 The methodological puzzle that we face when trying to settle the dispute between different interpretations of the inattentional and change blindness effects raises the question of whether our commonsense beliefs about the conscious status of unattended items are well founded. Such beliefs seem to vary from person to person (Schwitzgebel, 2007), and to vary with certain features of the context in which they are probed (De Brigard, 2010). To the extent that we find it natural to suppose that unattended items do figure in consciousness, this may simply be owing to a version of the ‘refrigerator-light illusion’: If our reason for believing that we are conscious of the things to which we pay no attention is a reason that depends on our finding that we are conscious of those things whenever we check on them then that belief is on shaky ground. A checking procedure cannot provide us with good evidence about the status of unattended items since the act of checking is itself an act that involves a shift in attention to the things checked (O’Regan &amp; Noë, 2001).