Looking without Seeing

This class has talked not only about what reality is, but how we perceive it as well. However one thing that we didn't discuss is how much our perception is based on our knowledge. What we know makes a huge impact on what we see, and more specifically, what we notice. My favorite example of this is movie poster colors. [warning: once you read the next part, you will start seeing this everywhere, and movie posters will no longer look as cool] All movie posters aim to catch people attention, but do so subtlety; after all, making it too obvious would make the audience move on, and defeat the purpose. The way most graphic artist do this is by putting in contrasting colors, while keeping the colors seem natural. There are 2 main pairs that can do this: green and red, and blue and orange (yellow works as well). Since green and red yell Christmas, most graphic artist will try to add blues and oranges to their posters to add that POP. Here's a few examples:

As soon as someone told me this, I immediately began seeing it everywhere. Everything from the new Avengers posters to the Hobbit seems to have thrown in some extra color here and there. It's been happening for years, but I only noticed once I knew about it. I feel that this is the case many times. We don't see things that should be obvious to us until we know to look for them, at which point we can't help but notice. Our perception of reality is just as much determined by what we know as by what is actually there.