As I have pointed out several times before, under certain conditions as you have postulated, humans are far more susceptible to illusions than most of us are willing to acknowledge.
Reference the above I would hypothesise that this can well be true in an unexpected situation or one with startle factor. You might revert to a comparable scenario that is in your memory data base and act according to that.
However, as PukinDog so succinctly put it, there should not have been any startle factor. There should not have been any last minute reliance on previous encounters with such a scenario because what they would see in front of them is what was NOTAM'd and thus pre-warned. Could this be where the root cause is and where the first hole was opened?