  There is a fundamental puzzle in understanding our awareness of the visual
world. On one hand, our subjective experience is one of a rich visual world,
which we perceive effortlessly. However, when we actually test perception,
observers know surprisingly little. A number of tasks, from search, through
inattentional blindness, to change blindness, suggest that there is
surprisingly little awareness or perception without attention. Meanwhile,
another set of tasks, such as multiple object tracking, dual-task performance,
and visual working memory tasks suggest that both attention and working memory
have low capacity. These two components together - poor perception without
attention, and greatly limited capacity for attention and memory - imply that
perception is impoverished.
  How can we make sense of this awareness puzzle, of the riddle of our rich
subjective experience coupled with poor performance on experimental tasks? I
suggest that, looked at in the right way, there is in fact no awareness puzzle.
In particular, I will argue that the tasks that show limits are inherently
difficult tasks, and that there exists a unified explanation for both the rich
subjective experience and the apparent limits.
