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. Wood frogs demonstrate extreme inattentional blindness—their visual system only triggers on movement, so they'll starve surrounded by dead flies. Owls exhibit the opposite trade-off: their forward-facing eyes give acute focus but no peripheral vision, forcing constant head rotation. The mechanism: neural resources are finite, attention is selective, and focusing means filtering. Prey fish like herring counteract this by schooling—predators can only focus on one target, so the rest become functionally invisible. What you don't attend to doesn't exist perceptually.