Ive been working on Counter Parts stuff in the background,
heres a concept for how familiarity (awareness) and importantness (impact) with another creature can directly affect how you see it, using our good "friend" the mimic spider as an example.
The mimic spider has high Aspiration towards lighthouses, which means that by default to other creatures they appear almost identical to lighthouses. This is a problem if you rely on lighthouses for safety. The more important lighthouses are to you, the more visible they appear, as you become attuned to noticing their existence. Due to the high Aspiration though, the effect also applies to mimic spiders. To balance this issue, the more you become aware of mimic spiders, the more obvious its tells become. Of course, your awareness is limited by your creature's intelligence and general awareness, so in order to see through their disguise, you need to either get it smarter and more observant, or you need to be hunted by mimic spiders enough to where noticing the differences becomes a part of your creature's survival instincts.
By directly changing how things look, your human awareness can be controlled and variable.
It might seem unfair to lose to something that looked exactly like a safe creature, but the next time you see it, it wont look exactly like it.
