Don't get misdirected! Differences in overt and covert attentional inhibition between children and adults.

Previous research has revealed marked improvements in cognitive control between the age of 10 years and adulthood. The aim of the current study was to explore differences in attentional control between adults and children within a natural context, namely whilst they were watching a magic trick. We measured participants' eye movements whilst they watched a misdirection trick in which attentional misdirection was used to prevent observers from noticing a salient visual event. Half of our participants failed to detect this event even though it took place in full view. Children below the age of 10 were significantly less likely to notice the event than the adults and were also more reliably overtly misdirected (i.e., where they looked). Our results illustrate that within a more naturalistic context children are significantly more distracted than adults, and this distraction can have major implications on their visual awareness.

Don't be fooled! Attentional responses to social cues in a face-to-face and video magic trick reveals greater top-down control for overt than covert attention.

People's attention is oriented towards faces, but the extent to which these social attention effects are under top down control is more ambiguous. Our first aim was to measure and compare, in real life and in the lab, people's top-down control over overt and covert shifts in reflexive social attention to the face of another. We employed a magic trick in which the magician used social cues (i.e. asking a question whilst establishing eye contact) to misdirect attention towards his face, and thus preventing participants from noticing a visible colour change to a playing card. Our results show that overall people spend more time looking at the magician's face when he is seen on video than in reality. Additionally, although most participants looked at the magician's face when misdirected, this tendency to look at the face was modulated by instruction (i.e., "keep your attention on the cards"), and therefore, by top down control. Moreover, while the card's colour change was fully visible, the majority of participants failed to notice the change, and critically, change detection (our measure of covert attention) was not affected by where people looked (overt attention). We conclude that there is a tendency to shift overt and covert attention reflexively to faces, but that people exert more top down control over this overt shift in attention. These finding are discussed within a new framework that focuses on the role of eye movements as an attentional process as well as a form of non-verbal communication.

A psychologically-based taxonomy of misdirection.

Magicians use misdirection to prevent you from realizing the methods used to create a magical effect, thereby allowing you to experience an apparently impossible event. Magicians have acquired much knowledge about misdirection, and have suggested several taxonomies of misdirection. These describe many of the fundamental principles in misdirection, focusing on how misdirection is achieved by magicians. In this article we review the strengths and weaknesses of past taxonomies, and argue that a more natural way of making sense of misdirection is to focus on the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved. Our psychologically-based taxonomy has three basic categories, corresponding to the types of psychological mechanisms affected: perception, memory, and reasoning. Each of these categories is then divided into subcategories based on the mechanisms that control these effects. This new taxonomy can help organize magicians' knowledge of misdirection in a meaningful way, and facilitate the dialog between magicians and scientists.

Attentional capture by spoken language: effects on netballers' visual task performance.

In two experiments, participants performed visual detection, visual discrimination and decision-making tasks, in which a binary (left/right) response was required. In all experimental conditions, a spoken word ("left"/"right") was presented monaurally (left or right ear) at the onset of the visual stimulus. In Experiment 1, 26 non-athletes located a target amongst an array of distractors as quickly as possible, in both the presence and absence of spoken cues. Participants performed superiorly in the presence of valid cues, relative to invalid-cue and control conditions. In Experiment 2, 42 skilled netballers completed three tasks, in randomised order: a visual detection task, a visual discrimination task and a netball decision-making task - all in the presence of spoken cues. Our data showed that spoken auditory cues affected not only target detection, but also performance on more complex decision-making tasks: cues that were either spatially or semantically invalid slowed target detection time; spatially invalid cues impaired discrimination task accuracy; and cues that were either spatially or semantically valid improved accuracy and speeded decision-making time in the netball task. When studying visual perception and attention in sport, the impact of concomitant auditory information should be taken into account in order to achieve a more representative task design.

Saccade control in natural images is shaped by the information visible at fixation: evidence from asymmetric gaze-contingent windows.

When people view images, their saccades are predominantly horizontal and show a positively skewed distribution of amplitudes. How are these patterns affected by the information close to fixation and the features in the periphery? We recorded saccades while observers encoded a set of scenes with a gaze-contingent window at fixation: Features inside a rectangular (Experiment 1) or elliptical (Experiment 2) window were intact; peripheral background was masked completely or blurred. When the window was asymmetric, with more information preserved either horizontally or vertically, saccades tended to follow the information within the window, rather than exploring unseen regions, which runs counter to the idea that saccades function to maximize information gain on each fixation. Window shape also affected fixation and amplitude distributions, but horizontal windows had less of an impact. The findings suggest that saccades follow the features currently being processed and that normal vision samples these features from a horizontally elongated region.