Inattentional blindness: Looking without seeing

Surprising as it may seem research shows that we rarely see what we are looking at unless our attention is directed to it. This phenomenon can have serious life and death consequences. Although the inextricable link between perceiving and attending was noted long ago by Aristolic this phenomenon now called inattentional blindness (IB), only recently has been named and carefully studied. Among they many questions that have been raised about IB are questions about the fate of the clearly visible yet unseen stimuli, whether any stimuli reliably capture attention, and if so what they have in common. Finally,is IB an instance of rapid forgetting or is it a failure to perceive?