# inattentional amnesia **Opening (not a real abstract):** Center for Ophthalmic Research Brigham and Women’s Hospital Dept. of Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School Wolfe, J. M (1999). Inattentional amnesia. In V. Coltheart (Ed.), Fleeting Memories(pp.71-94). Imagine that you are on the street and someone pulls you aside to ask you directions. You begin to engage this person in conversation. For mysterious reasons, in the middle of this conversation, workers, carrying a door, walk between you and the other person. When the door is gone, the original person has been replaced by a different person. Would you notice if Stranger One was replaced by Stranger Two? The intuitive answer is "Of course, I would." How could you fail to realize that you were no longer talking to the same person? The empirical answer, from a clever experiment by Dan Simons and Dan Levin (1997) is that people fail to notice this change about **Authors:** [[Inattentional Amnesia]]