 The difficulty in the case of the unnoticed gorilla is to discern whether unattended items are present to consciousness but present only as unindividuated items to which no demonstrative reference has yet been directed, or whether those unattended items are instead absent from consciousness altogether. Part of this difficulty originates in the fact that, although most people give no attention to the gorilla, they could attend to him, and would have done so if anything had prompted them to do so. More data may be available, both to introspection and to laboratory measurement, in cases where our failure to attend has some more systemic explanation. Ned Block has suggested that one such case is found in our perception of peripheral stimuli, when these are subject to the phenomenon of ‘identity crowding’ (Block, 2013a). An individual ‘T’ or ‘F’ can be seen reasonably clearly, even when presented in a peripheral part of the visual field. But if additional characters are presented alongside this individual character, then the properties of those characters become prone to perceptual confusion. Attention seems to bind together properties from all of the characters in the vicinity of the one individual that we are trying to pick out. It therefore seems that, in the perceptual periphery, attention cannot be directed onto a region that fits an individual character tightly. Due to this ‘crowding’ effect, individual letters or shapes become impossible to individuate from the others with which they are clustered, when they fall into parts of the visual field that are outside of the high-definition centre. The properties of objects that are crowded in this way can nonetheless be seen, and the fact that several items are present can be reliably reported. On the basis of empirical and introspective considerations, Block claims that, even in cases where the crowded characters share all of their features with the others by which they are crowded, these crowded characters are consciously discriminated from their surroundings. He claims that these characters figure as objects in consciousness. Since attention cannot be allocated to anything more fine-grained than the crowd of which these characters are a part, the characters are not themselves objects to which attention is paid. Block therefore takes ‘identity crowding’ to give counterexamples to the claim that we are conscious of objects only when paying attention to them.