People follow their interests, their needs, their customs. They are driven by curiosity, boredom, emotion. What Benway and Lane found was this. Nobody could possibly miss it. Lo and behold, Benway and Lane showed, it was the rare individual who noticed that this bold and salient banner contained the information being sought.
People are lawful.
If they weren't, we couldn't have science of cognition. Here is my theory. Note that this is still theory, informed, but nonetheless, still untested. If the banner blindness paper tells us anything, it is not to accept theory until it has been tested through observation. Still, the theory seems pertinent, relevant, and consistent with a large body of existing knowledge, so let me try it out on you.