Psychology
You can look straight at something and miss it.
Focusing on one task can make you miss an unexpected event in plain sight: inattentional blindness.
The idea
Failing to notice something does not automatically establish a lack of ability or effort.
An example
An original workplace example: while counting items in an order, someone may overlook a separate detail. The experiment supports caution about attention; it does not prove what happened in that specific workplace incident.
Try it
For a task with two important checks, write each check explicitly instead of assuming one glance covers both.
More context
Simons and Chabris demonstrated failures to notice unexpected events while observers attended to a demanding task. This is called inattentional blindness. Looking at a scene does not guarantee noticing everything in it. Research finding · attention experiment, not an intelligence test
Sources & further reading
the 102 platform