Term: Inattentional Blindness

Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is the failure to notice a fully-visible object because attention is given to another object, task or event. People experience this blindness when they have preconceived expectations about what they are seeing or when they focus on one thing that causes them to miss another. This phenomenon is what magicians exploit to accomplish their illusions.

Artists must learn to overcome inattentional blindness to become fully aware of their surroundings. This means learning to see things as they are and not how we expect them to be. For example, a new artists may perceive the sky as blue or the grass as green even when the visual information they see contradicts these ideas. We think we see everything but in reality we only see those things that we pay attention to, missing everything else. Our minds fill-in the missing parts of the scene with what we know or imagine. It is inattentiveness that allows the illusion of representational art to fool people into thinking they are seeing something that is real when in fact the art only mimics reality.