red car
I'd thought you were referring to the experience of a process of a kind of learning in which one accumulates exposures, unawares, to a given thing over time until a 'critical mass of exposures' is reached and one becomes cognizant of it and the thing has been learned.
The red car example, though, suggests a modification of an adaptive filtering. A thing which has no special bearing on the observer, he may exclude from 'conscious observation'* as a way of organizing the world or making it manageable, becomes significant as the result of a specific experience or action on his part, here, buying a new red car.
Yes, there has to be a psych term for this kind of filtering and it's modification, as well as for the experience of an apparent new and sudden ubiquity.
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*This is all very loosely put, but...
