"The term inattentional blindness was coined by Arien Mack and Irvin Rock in 1992. It was used as the title of Rock's last text published in 1998 by the MIT Press.
The best-known study demonstrating inattentional blindness was conducted by Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University. Their study, a contemporized version of earlier studies conducted by Ulric Neisser, asked subjects to watch a short video in which two groups of people (wearing black and white t-shirts) pass a basketball around. The subjects are told to either count the number of passes made by one of the teams or to keep count of bounce passes vs. aerial passes. In different versions of the video a woman walks through the scene carrying an umbrella, or wearing a full gorilla suit. After watching the video the subjects are asked if they saw anything out of the ordinary take place. In most groups, 50% of the subjects did not report seeing the gorilla. Simons interprets this by stating that people are mistaken with regard to how important events will automatically draw their attention away from current tasks or goals. This result indicates that the relationship between what is in one's visual field and perception is based much more significantly on attention than was previously thought.
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NASA conducted an experiment in a flight simulator in which commercial pilots were tested to see if they would notice distractions on a runway during simulated landings. Those who were trained pilots did not notice and landed directly on top of the distraction 1/4 of the time, while untrained pilots didn't know what to expect of a typical landing and thus saw the distraction."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness
From a perspective of beliefs it is possible that many believers are so conditioned to see the world through the lens of their beliefs that they generally do not "see" things that contradict their beliefs.
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