Attention and misdirection

Misdirection aims to prevent the spectator from noticing the method, whilst still experiencing the effect (Lamont & Wiseman, 1999). Failure to notice the method is important, but spectators must still experience the effect. Good misdirection is misdirection which is not perceived.

Misdirection can be via perceptual misdirection (attentional and non-attentional), memory misdirection (forgetting and misremembering), and reasoning misdirection (ruse, feigning, false assumptions about magic).

Attention plays an important role in determining what we see

Selective viewing and listening tasks can show this:

• Inattentional blindness: if we're engaged in an attentionally demanding task we fail to see the unexpected
• Unattended auditory information is missed
• Change blindness: failing to see salient changes to a scene if we don't attend to them

Exogenous attention: automatically alerts us to changes in the environment. It allows us to rapidly respond to things with little conscious effort

Endogenous attention: attention which is driven by our intentions

The misdirection paradigm: a pseudo-magic trick in which misdirection is used to prevent people from seeing a visible event. Where we look and what we see is measured.

Misdirection is extremely effective at manipulating what we see. Most participants failed to see a lighter and cigarette drop even though these events were fully visible (Kuhn & Tatler, 2005). Most participants failed to see a visible colour change when misdirected (Kuhn, Teszka, Tenaw & Kingstone, 2016).

Misdirection works because magic relies on people being ignorant and unaware of the method. Misdirection also relies on people being unaware of their limited conscious representation of the world. Intuition is incorrect.

In the justice system:

• Eye witness reports: people's representations of events may be even less reliable than thought
• People are unlikely to notice unexpected (even salient) events
• Just because the person was looking, this does not imply they were seeing what was happening

Chabris et al (2011) found that 56% participants, in bright conditions, failed to notice a fight happening visibly around 8 metres from their position while following a confederate. In dark conditions, 35% of participants noticed the fight.

Hyman, Boss, Wise, McKenzie & Caggiano (2010): individuals walking through a university campus were much less likely to notice a brightly coloured clown riding a unicycle if they were talking on their mobile (25% notice), compared with listening to a music player (61%), or walking (51%).

Haines (1999): experienced pilots doing a flight simulator landed a plane breaking through fog on the runway, over another plane that was sitting on the runway, failing to notice it