Perceptual Blindness
Inattentional Blindness
Lack of attention that is not associated with any physical or instrumental defects — where objects or events that are unexpected and should be easy to notice simply are not.
Origin
The term was coined by psychologist Arien Mack of the New School for Social Research and Irvin Rock, presented in 1992 and formalised in their 1998 MIT Press book Inattentional Blindness. They built on Ulric Neisser's 1975 selective-looking experiments, which had demonstrated similar failures without naming them. The concept gained wide public recognition through Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris's 1999 "gorilla" experiment, in which observers counting basketball passes reliably failed to notice a person in a gorilla costume walking through the frame.