Inattentional blindness

Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is the phenomenon of not being able to perceive things that are in plain sight. This can be a result of having no internal frame of reference to perceive the unseen objects, or it can be the result of the mental focus or attention which cause mental distractions. The phenomenon is due to how our minds see and process information. Closely related to the subject of change blindness, it is an observed phenomenon of the inability to perceive features in a visual scene when the observer is not attending to them.