Final answer:
The term ‘inattentional blindness’ describes the failure to notice visible objects due to focusing attention elsewhere, exemplified by the basketball passing experiment by Simons and Chabris.
Step-by-step explanation:
The term used to describe the phenomenon where a person fails to notice something that is completely visible due to a lack of attention is known as inattentional blindness. This occurs when a person is so focused on a specific task or aspect of their environment that they completely miss other obvious features or changes in their surroundings. A classic demonstration of this was the basketball passing experiment by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris (1999), where participants failed to notice a person in a gorilla costume because they were so engrossed in counting basketball passes. Similarly, in another experiment, participants watching objects moving across a screen often failed to notice an unexpected red cross when they were instructed to focus on either black or white objects only.