play a subsequent role on behavior. Inattentional blindness is related to but distinct from other failures of visual awareness such as change blindness, repetition blindness, visual masking, and attentional blink. The key aspect of inattentional blindness which makes it distinct from other failures in awareness rests on the fact that the undetected stimulus is unexpected. It is the unexpected nature of said stimulus that differentiates inattentional blindness from failures of awareness such as attentional failures like the aforementioned attentional blink. It is critical to acknowledge that occurrences of inattentional blindness are attributed to the failure to consciously attend to an item in the visual field as opposed the absence of cognitive processing. Findings such as inattentional blindness – the failure to notice a fully visible but unexpected object because attention was engaged on another task, event, or object – has changed views on how the brain stores and integrates visual information, and has led to further questioning and investigation of the brain and importantly of cognitive processes. Cognitive capture Cognitive capture or, cognitive tunneling, is an inattentional blindness phenomenon in which the observer is too focused on instrumentation, task at hand, internal thought, etc. and not on the present environment. For example, while driving, a driver focused on the speedometer and not on the road is suffering from cognitive capture. The cognition debate: early vs. late selection of attention One of the foremost conflicts among researchers of inattentional blindness surrounds the processing of unattended stimuli. More specifically, there is disagreement in the literature about exactly how much processing of a visual scene is completed before selection dictates which stimuli will be consciously perceived, and which will not be (i.e. inattentional blindness). Two basic schools of thought exist on the issue – those who believe selection occurs early in the perceptual process, and those who believe it occurs only after significant processing. Early selection theorists propose that perception of stimuli is a limited process requiring selection to proceed. This suggests that the decision to attend to specific stimuli occurs early in processing, soon after the rudimentary study of physical features; only those selected stimuli are then fully processed. On the other hand, proponents of late selection theories argue that perception is an unlimited operation, and all stimuli in a visual scene are processed simultaneously. In this case, selection of relevant information is done after full processing of all stimuli. While early