Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research

Abstract

Just as vision scientists study visual art and illusions to elucidate the workings of the visual system, so too can cognitive scientists study cognitive illusions to elucidate the underpinnings of cognition. Magic shows are a manifestation of accomplished magic performers' deep intuition for and understanding of human attention and awareness. By studying magicians and their techniques, neuroscientists can learn powerful methods to manipulate attention and awareness in the laboratory. Such methods could be exploited to directly study the behavioural and neural basis of consciousness itself, for instance through the use of brain imaging and other neural recording techniques.

The effects of individual differences and task difficulty on inattentional blindness

“…Note, though, that magicians rarely do exactly the same trick in exactly the same way twice in a row, since that would make it more likely that observers would detect their method. In some respects, the tendency to be fooled by magic tricks is more akin to change blindness (see Kuhn, Amlani, & Rensink, 2008;Macknik et al, 2008), in that people fail to see how something came about rather than failing to notice the end state. That is, they fail to notice how a bunny suddenly appeared in the magician's hand, but they do see the bunny.…”

The ball vanishes in the air: can we blame representational momentum?

“…Thus, eye behavior is not a predictor of illusion sensitivity, and during a magic trick, there is sometimes a dissociation between the place where the spectators are looking and the place where they are directing their attention (Kuhn & Findlay, 2010;Kuhn & Tatler, 2005;Kuhn, Tatler, Findlay, & Cole, 2008). As stated by Macknik, Randi, Robbins, Thompson and Martinez-Conde (2008), Bin the more subtle Bcovert misdirection,^the magician draws the spectator's attentional spotlight (which can be thought of as the spectator's focus of suspicion) away from the method without redirecting the spectator's gaze^(p. 872). We assume that two other major processes could also be involved in the VBI.…”

“…In doing so, they have acquired a fine-grained but intuitive understanding of many facets of our cognitive functioning. The art of magic not only offers psychology an original and promising research domain for gaining insight into certain well-known cognitive processes but also may be fruitful for discovering mechanisms still poorly understood today (for reviews, see Kuhn, Amlani, & Rensink, 2008;Kuhn & Martinez, 2011;Macknik, MartinezConde & Blakeslee, 2010;Macknik, Randi, Robbins, Thompson, & Martinez-Conde, 2008;Thomas, Didierjean, Maquestiaux, & Gygax, 2015).…”

Corpus Creation and Perceptual Evaluation of Expressive Theatrical Gestures

“…Lastly, a magician is an artist of misdirection. He must thus master and use his entire body to mislead the senses of the spectator while performing [9], [14]. Therefore, we consider it an interesting trial case for the kind of scenario we are looking for.…”