Research suggests that people can sometimes forget about even vivid and crazy things that happen in the course of an otherwise ordinary event (for example, a man in a gorilla suit running through a game of catch). Why

Our schema for the event selectively "tunes" our attention toward expected events and away from unexpected events.

Explanation:

Schema can be defined as follows;

1. A hypothetical knowledge structure that contains what a person knows about a particular concept, including the relations among objects, relevant events, actions and sequences of actions

Example 1: Your knowledge of an egg

once it is activated, it affects attention, interpretation and memory

Example 2: A recovering alcoholic is interested in dating a librarian and sees her at a party and his friend says she was drinking beer.

but he swears she was drinking soda. His schemas about librarians led him to improperly encode what she was drinking.

2. When people have judgements about everyday events, the feature-matching process usually leads people to select the right schema to encode a given event.

3. The influence of schemas on behavior: research in which participants who were primed to think of elderly people later walked more slowly down a hallway.