Change blindness

Biological Parallel

Hermit crabs fail to notice gradual shell deterioration until catastrophic failure—they inhabit shells through incremental decay without updating their assessment. Change blindness occurs when alterations happen outside attention windows or across interruptions. Migrating birds navigate by star patterns but fail to notice gradual stellar precession over evolutionary time—their navigation becomes miscalibrated over millennia. Slow change evades detection systems optimized for discrete events.