While Driving Home One Evening, Owen Is So Involved in His

While driving home one evening, Owen is so involved in his cell phone conversation that he doesn't notice an empty car at the side of the road and hits it. Owen is all right, but since it wasn't yet dark, the police say Owen should have had no problems seeing the car. When they learn he was talking on his phone, they say that because he was distracted, other stimuli didn't register in his consciousness. This phenomenon is referred to as

A) top-down processing.
B) shadowing.
C) inattentional blindness.
D) a Gestalt law.
E) top-down filtering.