Generally I study visual attention; it has been thought that we retain an accurate portrayal of our visual world simply by using our sense of vision. However, people are often poor at detecting large changes in their visual environment and they miss important information when their attention is focused on a primary task. My research focuses on examining factors that influence people’s ability to detect visual information that is vital to an accurate representation, because in many situations it is this information that if missed can lead to deleterious effects. There are many image properties that can affect visual attention, such as salience, scene context, and complexity. In addition, there may be factors within the individual that influence visual attention abilities, such as expertise and working memory capacity.