It matters HOW you are paying attention
good old brain isn’t the simple aspic they make it out to be, visual and auditory processing systems are complex, sophisticated, multilayered things… TAF may have an evolutionary reason for kicking in at a precise moment in the mating sequence, say when you want to study the object of your affections exceedingly closely for genetic value.. the brain like to be conservative, it hates wasting computational power on familiar background features, so it labels most things same old shit to be manouvered around and not thought about to hard.