Inattentional blindness

Biological Parallel

Focused predators miss prey outside their attentional spotlight—cheetahs locked on one gazelle ignore easier targets that cross their path. Attention is a searchlight, not a floodlight: focus creates blind spots. Frogs demonstrate extreme inattentional blindness—they'll starve surrounded by dead flies because their visual system only triggers on movement. The mechanism: neural resources are finite, attention is selective, and focusing means filtering. What you don't attend to doesn't exist perceptually.