Distracting the player

So I've recently started playing The Witness and I've found it to have several concepts in it that I normally don't encounter in games, most notably distracting the player, so I was wondering how to implement this?

There's puzzles tha require you to...
* follow audio cues, but later ones in these include extra noise to distract from the noises you Need to follow.
* mimic a path formed by shadows, but there's extraneous shadows formed by other things that you need to ignore.
* ignore extra pieces to the puzzles and not try to include them.

I'm sure there's more once you get farther in or just figure out the ones I've for now ignored, but these are the ones I've seen so far.

Some of these relate to busy environment but are there to purposefully to distract the player from finding the solution rather than hiding the solution, because the solution is right there but you're being distracted from it by the extra things.

Generally these are all just simply distractions. But how to convey that they're not optional distractions (activities, challenges, etc.) but rather something that's quite literally trying to prevent you from completing the problem you're facing, is not coming to me.

There's also puzzles where the solution to one puzzle is the anti-solution to another, meaning you need to do the opposite. I'm not sure if the hints get unclear at some point on which is the case, but so far they've been clear, but it's possible in other games the hints for that are Not clear.

And yet other puzzles have inaccurate hints for how to solve them.

Does Busy Environment apply to Sonic CD? When I first played the game, I could not tell which graphics represent unpassable walls and which were 'background' walls, same with the myriad of unreactive sceneries and interactive objects.

Short answer: no.

I think that's different problem where the game does not distinguish background/foreground scenery from the actual gameplay area. This is actually a far more common problem than might think, but is not part of the busy environment tag as I understand. Busy environment tag is about there being large amount of activity in the environment that is trying to draw attention from the player from what's important, while the lack of distinction between scenery and gameplay areas does not require any active distracting in such manner.

Not entirely sure right now, but I think The Sun at Night had the same problem with backgrounds looking interactable. There's dozens more with that problem tho.