The role of audience participation and task relevance on change detection during a card trick

On the cognitive bases of illusionism

Cognitive scientists have paid very little attention to magic as a distinctly human activity capable of creating situations that are considered impossible because they violate expectations and conclude with the apparent transgression of well-established cognitive and natural laws. This illusory experience of the "impossible" entails a very particular cognitive dissonance that is followed by a subjective and complex "magical experience". Here, from a perspective inspired by visual neuroscience and ecological cognition, we propose a set of seven fundamental cognitive phenomena (from attention and perception to memory and decision-making) plus a previous pre-sensory stage that magicians interfere with during the presentation of their effects. By doing so, and using as an example the deconstruction of a classic trick, we show how magic offers novel and powerful insights to study human cognition. Furthermore, live magic performances afford to do so in tasks that are more ecological and context-dependent than those usually exploited in artificial laboratory settings. We thus believe that some of the mysteries of how the brain works may be trapped in the split realities present in every magic effect.

Microsaccades reflect the dynamics of misdirected attention in magic

The methods of magicians provide powerful tools for enhancing the ecological validity of laboratory studies of attention. The current research borrows a technique from magic to explore the relationship between microsaccades and covert attention under near-natural viewing conditions. We monitored participants' eye movements as they viewed a magic trick where a coin placed beneath a napkin vanishes and reappears beneath another napkin. Many participants fail to see the coin move from one location to the other the first time around, thanks to the magician's misdirection. However, previous research was unable to distinguish whether or not participants were fooled based on their eye movements. Here, we set out to determine if microsaccades may provide a window into the efficacy of the magician's misdirection. In a multi-trial setting, participants monitored the location of the coin (which changed positions in half of the trials), while engaging in a delayed match-to-sample task at a different spatial location. Microsaccades onset times varied with task difficulty, and microsaccade directions indexed the locus of covert attention. Our combined results indicate that microsaccades may be a useful metric of covert attentional processes in applied and ecologically valid settings.

What is the role of the film viewer? The effects of narrative comprehension and viewing task on gaze control in film

Film is ubiquitous, but the processes that guide viewers’ attention while viewing film narratives are poorly understood. In fact, many film theorists and practitioners disagree on whether the film stimulus (bottom-up) or the viewer (top-down) is more important in determining how we watch movies. Reading research has shown a strong connection between eye movements and comprehension, and scene perception studies have shown strong effects of viewing tasks on eye movements, but such idiosyncratic top-down control of gaze in film would be anathema to the universal control mainstream filmmakers typically aim for. Thus, in two experiments we tested whether the eye movements and comprehension relationship similarly held in a classic film example, the famous opening scene of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (Welles & Zugsmith, Touch of Evil, 1958). Comprehension differences were compared with more volitionally controlled task-based effects on eye movements. To investigate the effects of comprehension on eye movements during film viewing, we manipulated viewers’ comprehension by starting participants at different points in a film, and then tracked their eyes. Overall, the manipulation created large differences in comprehension, but only produced modest differences in eye movements. To amplify top-down effects on eye movements, a task manipulation was designed to prioritize peripheral scene features: a map task. This task manipulation created large differences in eye movements when compared to participants freely viewing the clip for comprehension. Thus, to allow for strong, volitional top-down control of eye movements in film, task manipulations need to make features that are important to narrative comprehension irrelevant to the viewing task. The evidence provided by this experimental case study suggests that filmmakers’ belief in their ability to create systematic gaze behavior across viewers is confirmed, but that this does not indicate universally similar comprehension of the film narrative.