Humans routinely miss important information that is ‘right in front of our eyes’, from overlooking typos in a paper to failing to see a cyclist in an intersection. Recent studies on these ‘Looked But Failed To See’ (LBFTS) errors point to a common mechanism underlying these failures, whether the missed item was an unexpected gorilla, the clearly defined target of a visual search, or that simple typo. We argue that normal blindness is the by-product of the limited-capacity prediction engine that is our visual system. The processes that evolved to allow us to move through the world with ease are virtually guaranteed to cause us to miss some significant stimuli, especially in important tasks like driving and medical image perception.

人类经常会错过“就在我们眼前”的重要信息，从忽略报纸上的拼写错误到看不到十字路口的骑自行车者。最近对这些“看过但没看到”（LBFTS）错误的研究指出了这些失败背后的共同机制，无论丢失的项目是意外的大猩猩、视觉搜索的明确定义的目标还是简单的拼写错误。我们认为，正常失明是我们视觉系统的有限预测引擎的副产品。让我们能够轻松地在世界上行走的过程实际上肯定会导致我们错过一些重要的刺激，特别是在驾驶和医学图像感知等重要任务中。