What is "inattentional blindness"

n. the phenomenon of not being able to perceive things that are in plain sight

Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is a psychological lack of attention that is not associated with any vision defects or deficits. It may be further defined as the event in which an individual fails to recognize an unexpected stimulus that is in plain sight. When it simply becomes impossible for one to attend to all the stimuli in a given situation, a temporary blindness effect can take place as a result; that is, individuals fail to see objects or stimuli that are unexpected and quite often salient. The term was coined by Arien Mack and Irvin Rock in 1992 and was used as the title of their book of the same name, published by MIT press in 1998, in which they describe the discovery of the phenomenon and include a collection of procedures used in describing it. Research on inattentional blindness suggests that the phenomenon can occur in any individual, independent of cognitive deficits.

Numerous experiments have demonstrated that inattentional blindness also has an effect on people’s perception.