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attention
You fail to see clear objects when your focus is locked.
Inattentional blindness describes your inability to perceive visible stimuli when your attention is directed elsewhere.
In a famous 1999 study, participants tasked with counting basketball passes among players consistently failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. You do not see the world as it is; you see the world as you are attending to it. The rest of the scene simply does not reach your conscious awareness.
What you ignore is often as consequential as what you focus on.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Simons and Chabris, 1999, Perception
- What the check found
- The phenomenon is well-established in cognitive psychology and the citation for the Simons and Chabris study is correct, though the provided text lacks a descriptive summary of the experiment.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.