Misdirection – Past, Present, and the Future

Abstract

Misdirection refers to the magician’s ability to manipulate people’s attention, thoughts, and memory. It has been argued that some of the techniques used by magicians to orchestrate people’s attention and awareness may provide valuable insights into human cognition. In this paper we review the scientific, as well as some of the magic literature on misdirection. We focus on four main points: (1) the magician’s concept of misdirection, (2) the paradigms used to study misdirection scientifically, (3) review of the current scientific findings, and (4) future directions.

Full text

HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE
REVIEW ARTICLE
published: 06 January 2012
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00172
Misdirection – past, present, and the future
Gustav Kuhn1* and Luis M. Martinez 2*
1Department of Psychology, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK
2Instituto de Neurociencias de Alicante, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas-Universidad Miguel Hernández, Sant Joan d’Alacant, Spain
Edited by:
Idan Segev,The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Israel
Reviewed by:
Lutz Jäncke, University of Zurich,
Switzerland
Shlomo Bentin, The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Israel
*Correspondence:
Gustav Kuhn, Department of
Psychology, Brunel University,
Uxbridge UB8 3PH, UK.
e-mail: gustav.kuhn@brunel.ac.uk;
Luis M. Martinez, Instituto de
Neurociencias de Alicante, Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas-Universidad Miguel
Hernández, Campus de Sant Joan,
Avenida Ramón y Cajal, S/N, 03550
Sant Joan d’Alacant, Spain.
e-mail: l.martinez@umh.es
Misdirection refers to the magician’s ability to manipulate people’s attention, thoughts, and
memory. It has been argued that some of the techniques used by magicians to orchestrate
people’s attention and awareness may provide valuable insights into human cognition. In
this paper we review the scientific, as well as some of the magic literature on misdirection.
We focus on four main points: (1) the magician’s concept of misdirection, (2) the paradigms
used to study misdirection scientifically, (3) review of the current scientific findings, and
(4) future directions.
Keywords: misdirection, magic, attention, awareness
“The principle of misdirection plays such an important role
in magic that one might say that magic is misdirection and
misdirection is magic ”Hugard (1960, p. 115)
INTRODUCTION
Over the centuries magicians have developed powerful ways of
manipulating people’s perception (Christopher, 2006). In recent
years there has been much interest in understanding the scientific
basis of some of the techniques, as they are thought to provide
valuable insights into human cognition (Kuhn et al.,2008a;Mack-
nik et al., 2008;Kuhn, 2010). Much of this work has focused on
the concept of misdirection, a technique that is broadly defined as
manipulating people’s attention, thoughts, and memory. The aim
of this paper is to review the scientific, as well as some of the magic
literature on misdirection, to identify the differences between the
magician’s concept and the scientific view, while highlighting the
current scientific findings and potential future directions.
Magicians can manipulate people to an extraordinary degree
because our subjective impression of the world does not necessar-
ily match reality (Gregory, 2009). For instance, we consciously
experience the world as a seamless whole, continuous both in
space and time. However, our subjective perception of a scene
is actually based on a partial analysis performed by cells located
within separate brain areas and each selective to distinct aspects
of an object or event in different regions of visual space. In addi-
tion, our eyes constantly move as we explore the environment
providing a sequence of multiple views of the objects in our sur-
roundings. Visual continuity is, therefore, a brain construct that
depends, among other things, on our ability to store properties of
a scene and compare them across these perceptual interruptions.
This task is even more challenging considering our usual clut-
tered visual environment, which is filled with information that
is both relevant and irrelevant for our current behavior. The
neural mechanisms underlying our capacity to visually interpret
the world are still highly debated. Attention,defined as the process
by which we select a subset of available information while filter-
ing out the rest (Desimone and Duncan, 1995), seem to play a
critical role in determining what (and how) we perceive about
ourselves and the environment, hence the famous saying that we
only see that to what we pay attention. Moreover, we frequently
perceive and process events based on expectations, rather than
the physical state of the world. For example Bunzeck et al. (2005)
found activations in the auditory cortex during presentation of
scenes normally accompanied by characteristic auditory stimuli,
thus demonstrating the subjectiveness of perception on a neural
level. Magicians have long taken advantage of perceptual processes
involving attention and awareness to manipulate their audience’s
conscious experience during magic tricks. We believe that magical
techniques, if used in a controlled, laboratory like, environment,
will become an invaluable tool to explore the neural mechanisms
and behavioral underpinnings of consciousness, attention, and
visual perception.
MISDIRECTION – THE MAGICIAN’S CONCEPT
Misdirection deals with manipulating what people see and remem-
ber about an event. Given the complexity of the perceptual process,
it may come as little surprise that defining misdirection is rather
difficult. As Fitzkee (1945) points out, the magic literature has
failed to come up with any satisfactory definition of misdirection.
In a literal sense, the prefix “mis” means wrong or wrongly, whilst
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Kuhn and Martinez Misdirection
direction means to point out a way or to guide or to instruct.
Misdirection can therefore literally be defined as pointing out the
wrong way. Another way of defining misdirection is by focusing
on its function. Any magic effect (what the spectator sees) requires
a method (the method used to produce the effect). The main pur-
pose of misdirection is to disguise the method and thus prevent
the audience from detecting it whilst still experiencing the effect
(Figure 1;Sharpe, 1988;Lamont and Wiseman, 1999).
Misdirection is central to magic, and has attracted much inter-
est from magicians. Our conscious experience of the world is
determined by a cascade of cognitive and neurological processes;
generally starting with the encoding of perceptual information,
which is then further processed and stored in memory, before
being retrieved and thus entering consciousness (Koch, 2004).
Alterations to any of these processes will influence our conscious
experience and lead to conspicuous failures in awareness such
as change blindness (Simons and Rensink, 2005), inattentional
blindness (Mack and Rock, 1998;Simons and Chabris, 1999), rep-
etition blindness (Kanwisher, 1987;Whittlesea and Podrouzek,
1995;Whittlesea et al., 1995), visual masking (Macknik, 2006),
the attentional blink (Raymond et al., 1992), or simply forgetting
or mis-remembering (Loftus, 1979).
As a consequence magicians have developed techniques that
manipulate different levels of this perceptual chain. For exam-
ple, what we attend to (i.e., manipulating spatial attention)? How
we remember an event? How do we interpret causality? Whilst
much of the practical, as well as theoretical, knowledge about
misdirection is typically linked to specific magic tricks, numerous
FIGURE 1 | The Conjuror by Hieronymus Bosch (estimated 1475–1505).
The conjuror on the right captures his audience attention with a game of
cups and balls. Cups and balls routines were first introduced more than
2000 years ago and entail a host of classic effects of magic, such as
vanishes, appearances, transpositions, and substitutions. Performing a
cups and balls trick is highly regarded amongst magicians since it requires a
great deal of motor skills and coordination, combined with an excellent
audience management to effectively misdirect the spectators’ attention
away from the method. In this painting, misdirection is so powerful that the
spectator in the forefront, mesmerized by the conjuror’s performance, fails
to notice that someone standing behind him is stealing his wallet.
magic scholars have proposed frameworks that formulate some of
the general principles of misdirection. For example, Sharpe (1988)
distinguished between active and passive misdirection, whereby
the former involves those methods that attract spatial attention
due to some kind of transient change in sound or movement.
Passive misdirection, on the other hand, refers to methods that
work by unobtrusively manipulating our minds through the way
in which people react to static stimuli. Ascanio and Etcheverry
(2000), on the other hand, described 3degrees of misdirection.
The first degree would be when the magician performs two simul-
taneous actions, the method behind the magic trick, or secret
move, and a distractor. Having to attend to both, the spectator
cannot focus on the method and that, in general, suffices to make
this go unnoticed. In the second degree, the two actions are not
perceptually equivalent, such as when a big move covers a small
move, and as a result misdirection is enhanced. Ascanio’s third
degree would be the same as Sharp’s active misdirection. Magi-
cians often talk about misdirection in terms of creating zones of
high and low interest, whereby the former will attract attention
at the expense of the latter (Figure 2). In fact, Apollo Robins,
believes that misdirection is not merely to divert attention away
from the secret move. He thinks it is more about the magician’s
capacity to draw attention to a particular place, which he calls
frame, at a particular time (Robins, 2007; Magic of Consciousness
Symposium; http://assc2007.neuralcorrelate.com). This creates a
sort of tunnel vision in which any action occurring outside of the
frame goes unnoticed and, in addition, the smaller the frame the
stronger the sense of misdirection (see also Ascanio and Etchev-
erry, 2000). Moreover, differences are drawn between manipu-
lations of spatial attention and time perception (Sharpe, 1988;
Tamariz, 1988;Lamont and Wiseman, 1999;Ortiz, 2006). Time
misdirection works because magicians separate the method from
the magical effect and this separation generates false causal links
between unrelated actions, preventing the audience from being
able to mentally reconstruct the trick. As is apparent from this
small, and rather incomplete, review the concept of misdirection
has attracted much interest amongst magicians, and whilst it is
somewhat poorly defined and lacks a clear overarching theory,
magicians have developed much expertise in how our perception
can be manipulated.
MISDIRECTION – THE SCIENTIFIC PARADIGM
Science relies on clear definitions of concepts. Rather than explain-
ing misdirection as a whole, attempts have been made to link some
of the misdirection principles to scientific concepts of perception,
and develop paradigms that can be used to explore these mecha-
nisms more systematically. One such paradigm is the Misdirection
Paradigm (Figure 2), in which participants view a pseudo “magic
trick” in which the magician makes a cigaret and lighter disappear
(Kuhn and Tatler, 2005). The disappearance of these objects relies
on the magician dropping them into his lap, which happens in
full view of the observer. However, the misdirection employed by
the magician prevents most observers from detecting this event.
Crucially, as the method (i.e., the dropping of the objects) takes
place in full view, we can use participants’ detection of the method
(i.e., did you see the object being dropped?) as a probe of the
misdirection’s effectiveness.
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FIGURE 2 | Zones of high and low interest during a magic trick. The
figure shows the second by second breakdown of a misdirection routine.
The magic effect behind the trick was the disappearing of a lighter and a
cigaret; the method was for the magician to simply drop the items into his
lap. Although the dropping gesticulation was fully visible, misdirection
prevented most of the observers from seeing this event.The dotted and
solid ovals represent the areas of high and low interest, respectively. A
cigaret is removed from the packet and deliberately placed in the
magician’s mouth the wrong way round (1–7 s).The magician then
pretends to light the cigaret (7 s). The flame creates a high luminance and
attracts attention. Both the spectator and magician then notice this
mistake, which raises the interest in the cigaret (8s).The magician then
turns the cigaret around, while keeping his gaze fixed on the cigaret and
the hand manipulating it (8–9 s). During this maneuver, the hand holding
the lighter is lowered to the tabletop and drops the lighter into the
magician’s lap. This dropping of the lighter happens in a low area of
interest. The disappearing lighter is dramatically revealed by snapping his
fingers and waving his hands (11 s). The method for making the cigaret
disappear relies on it being dropped into the lap. This action is fully visible,
with the cigaret dropped from 15cm above the table top (11s).
Surprisingly, most participants did not see this: at the time the cigaret is
dropped it is an area of low interest (the other hand is an area of high
interest). In this case, the high interest is manipulated by three things: (i)
surprise: the disappearance of the lighter automatically leads to interest,
(ii) social cues: the magician looks at the hand that previously held the
lighter and rotates his body in that direction, and (iii) movement and
sound: at the time of the drop the magician snaps his fingers and waves
his hand, thereby attracting attention. Adapted from Kuhn et al. (2008a).
It has been argued that the mechanism involved in preventing
participants from detecting the method is analogous to inatten-
tional blindness (Kuhn and Tatler,2005;Kuhn and Findlay, 2010).
Inattentional blindness refers to the phenomena that people often
fail to perceive a fully visible event when engaged in an atten-
tionally demanding distractor task (Mack and Rock, 1998;Simons
and Chabris, 1999). Given the similarity between inattentional
blindness and misdirection, it has been argued that the principles
involved in misdirection rely on inattentional blindness, whereby
people’s attention is misdirected thus preventing them from per-
ceiving the method (Kuhn and Findlay, 2010). The similarities
and differences between inattentional blindness and misdirection
have caused much debate. Whilst some have argued for numerous
discontinuities between the two (Memmert, 2010;Memmert and
Furley, 2010), others have suggested that they do indeed involve
very similar concepts (Moran and Brady, 2010;Most, 2010;Kuhn
and Tatler, 2011). What is clear from this debate is that whilst
inattentional blindness paradigms typically require participants’
attention to be distracted using an explicit distractor task (e.g.,
count the number of basket ball passes), the distraction in the
misdirection paradigm occurs implicitly through different misdi-
rection principles (Kuhn and Tatler, 2011). Indeed it is people’s
failure in realizing that they have been misdirected, that is crucial,
and one of the features that distinguishes it from simple distraction
(Lamont et al., 2010).
The related phenomena of change blindness refers to people’s
failure in noticing substantial changes to a visual scene, if the
visual transient associated with the change is masked (Rensink
et al., 1997). Moreover, if attention is captured using a strong
attentional cue, participants often fail to notice the change, thus
demonstrating that attention is needed to consciously perceive it
(O’Regan et al., 1999). Change blindness could also involve a limit
in the amount of information about a scene that can be stored in
visual short-term memory (vSTM) at any given time, or a limit
on the comparison process (Scott-Brown et al., 2000). The exact
way that these different aspects of scene perception are involved
is still unclear. There are numerous situations in which a magi-
cian may switch an item for something else, and misdirection is
employed to prevent participants from detecting the change. As
such, rather than relaying on people’s perception of a transient
event, their susceptibility toward changeblindness offers a valuable
probe to investigate the effectiveness of misdirection. For example,
in a series of experiments, misdirection has been used to prevent
people from seeing an obvious color change to a deck of cards
(Teszka et al., 2011). Here linguistic social cues (i.e., asking a ques-
tion) were used to prevent participants from detecting this change;
thus change detection was used to measure the effectiveness of the
misdirection. Although the mechanism between inattentional and
change blindness may differ substantially (Rensink, 2000), in prac-
tice misdirection may be used to induce both types of blindness
(Memmert, 2010;Kuhn and Tatler, 2011).
Misdirection has also been used to investigate the mechanisms
involved in vSTM. Change blindness has been studied both in the
laboratory and in more realistic, real-world situations. In a labora-
tory setting, it is easy to control for cognitive load,vSTM capacity,
and the allocation of attention. However, change blindness pro-
tocols often employ rather un-naturalistic viewing conditions in
which subjects are asked to perform many repetitions of a task
that they know, or even have practiced, beforehand. During nat-
ural vision experiments, on the other hand, subjects are naïve to
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Kuhn and Martinez Misdirection
the task but it is difficult to control where they are directing their
attention to and whether or not they may be engaged in other,
competing, cognitive tasks. Some magic tricks provide a new and
unique opportunity to leverage the strengths of the two exper-
imental approaches while avoiding their particular drawbacks.
Alonso-Pablos et al. (submitted) have recently used misdirection
to study the interaction between attention and vSTM. Their results
show that items, cards or human faces in this case, that lie outside
the focus of attention can still be effectively stored in vSTM (see
also Simons et al., 2002). Moreover, this passive representation
of a visual scene is rather rich and, even though it does not give
rise to conscious perception, it can be unconsciously retrieved and
used in a two-alternative forced choice paradigm as efficiently as
the previously attended objects. These results suggest that a classi-
cal change detection paradigm might not be the best approach to
study the capacity of vSTM (see also Makovski et al., 2006). Inter-
estingly, this passive, unconscious, vSTM was very labile and the
authors showed that patter, the casual chitchat used by magicians
to distract audiences, can effectively interfere with, and even com-
pletely abolish, its contents. These results further illustrate that
magicians’ intuitions about the potential for distraction of verbal
misdirection, involving linguistic social cues, are fundamentally
correct.
Where people look provide us with an effective online mea-
sure of overt attention (Liversedge and Findlay, 2000;Hender-
son, 2003). Advances in eye tracking technologies have enabled
researchers to accurately measure people’s eye movements whilst
watching different types of magic tricks. Indeed these studies have
demonstrated a high consistency of eye movements, thus illustrat-
ing that misdirection is very effective in manipulating were people
look (Kuhn and Tatler,2005;Kuhn and Land, 2006). Macknik et al.
(2008) have defined overt misdirection as the magician’s actions
that divert the spectator’s gaze away from the method behind the
effect. Covert misdirection, on the other hand, refers to instances
in which it is the attention of the audience that is directed away
from the method, irrespective of the position of their gaze (e.g.,
Kuhn and Tatler, 2005). Whilst magicians are mainly concerned
with what people see, rather than were they look, misdirection
clearly offers a valuable tool to investigate, in addition, oculomo-
tor behavior (e.g., Kuhn and Tatler, 2005;Kuhn and Land, 2006;
Otero-Millan et al., 2011).
Rather than using misdirection to prevent people seeing an
event, misdirection can make people perceive illusory events that
have not occurred. For example, Triplett (1900;Kuhn and Land,
2006) developed the vanishing ball illusion in which a magician is
seen throwing a ball up in the air a couple of times, before merely
pretending to throw it. Most of the observers claimed to have seen
a “ghost ball” leaving the hand on the final throw, thus illustrating
that people’s perception of an event is largely influenced by expec-
tations, rather than the physical presence of the ball. Kuhn and
Land (2006) developed careful measures enabling them to estab-
lish the effectiveness of this illusion. Cui et al. (2011) developed a
related paradigm in which participants were repeatedly asked to
view a video clip of a magician tossing a coin from one hand to
the other. On some of the trials the coin was tossed for real, whilst
on the other half of the trial the magician merely pretended to toss
the coin. On a large proportion of trials, participants claimed to
have seen the coin fly from one hand to the other, even though
it was not physically present. People’s perception of this illusory
event could be used to measure the effectiveness of the illusions.
Whilst the magicians’ concept of misdirection may be rather
broadly defined, scientists have come up with a variety of par-
adigms that enable us to investigate some of the principles of
misdirection scientifically, and even take advantage of these mag-
ical techniques to explore the neural and behavioral correlates of
visual perception, attention, and awareness.
MISDIRECTION – THE SCIENTIFIC FINDINGS
Numerous studies have now demonstrated that misdirection pro-
vides an extremely effective way of manipulating what people see.
Rather surprisingly, these studies have consistently shown that
people’s detection of the event (i.e., the lighter or cigaret drop) was
independent of where they were looking (Figure 3), thus demon-
strating that misdirection generally relies on manipulating covert
(i.e., attention in the absence of eye movements),rather than overt
attention (i.e., were people look; Kuhn and Tatler, 2005;Kuhn et al.,
2008b, 2009;Kuhn and Findlay,2010). However, participants who
detected the drop were significantly faster to fixate the location
of where the event took place in subsequent saccades than those
who missed it. These results clearly illustrate that whilst covert and
overt attention can be dissociated in space (Posner, 1980), there is
a clear temporal link between the two.
FIGURE 3 | Misdirection works independently of direction of gaze. An
eye-tracker was used to record the subjects’ fixation points at the time of
the cigaret drop during the magic trick presented in Figure 2.(A) Results
from naïve participants who missed the cigaret drop. (B) Naïve participants
who detected the cigaret drop. (C) Informed participants who missed the
cigaret drop. (D) Informed participants who detected the cigaret drop. Most
of the naïve participants fixated either on the lighter hand, the head, or the
area between the lighter hand and the head. Most of the informed
participants looked at the lighter hand or the area between the lighter hand
and the head. Interestingly, only one informed participant was able to
detect the cigaret drop by using his foveal vision, showing that no
systematic differences were found between the two conditions. Adapted
from Kuhn et al. (2008a).
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Kuhn and Martinez Misdirection
Whilst magic works when viewed live as well as on television,
the subjective experience of watching a magician face-to-face is
clearly different from observing him/her on television. That said,
misdirection has been shown to be effective both when viewed in a
face-to-face interaction (Kuhn and Tatler, 2005;Tatler and Kuhn,
2007)aswellaswhenobservedonacomputermonitor(Kuhn
et al., 2008b). However, differences did emerge. For example, the
misdirection experienced in the face-to-face interaction was more
effective than when viewed on a monitor. Moreover, in the face-to-
face scenario, participants’ instruction as to what they were about
to see did not influence their eye movement behavior, nor did
it improve their detection of the dropped cigaret. However, when
viewed on a computer monitor, prior instructions influenced both
detection as well as eye movement behavior. It has recently been
shown that eye movements in social context greatly vary depend-
ing on whether a person is seen for real compared to a video screen
(Laidlaw et al., 2011), and future research could investigate the role
that the presentation medium has on misdirection.
One of the key rules in magic states that magicians should
never repeat the same trick using the same method. Indeed all of
the published papers to date demonstrate that participants are less
susceptible toward misdirection when the same trial is repeated
(Kuhn and Tatler, 2005;Kuhn et al., 2008b, 2009;Kuhn and Find-
lay, 2010;Cui et al., 2011). Whereas some research groups have
relied on single presentation of trials, others have opted to use
numerous presentations of the same trial (e.g., Cui et al., 2011).
Whilst the latter method is clearly advantageous in terms of effi-
cient data collection, the fact that the effectiveness of misdirection
is greatly reduced does raise some questions as to the reliability of
multiple trial presentations.
Even as many of the misdirection techniques are heavily
debated amongst magicians, most would agree that social cues
(i.e., where the magician looks) play a fundamental role in misdi-
rection. For example, as Sharpe points out“people tend to look in
the same direction as the person they are watching looks” (1988,
p. 64). Indeed most of the experimental work supports the view
that gaze cues play an important role in manipulating what peo-
ple see. For example, using the vanishing ball illusion, it has been
shown that participants’ susceptibility toward the illusion is greatly
influenced by the magician’s social cues (Kuhn and Land, 2006).
When the magician looked at the hand that was concealing the
ball, rather than following the imaginary trajectory of the ball, the
effectiveness of the illusion was greatly reduced. Using the Misdi-
rection Paradigm, an analysis of people’s eye movements showed
a strong correlation between were the magician was looking and
the observer’s gaze (Tatler and Kuhn, 2007). Moreover, using an
experimental approach in which the magician’s gaze cues were
experimentally manipulated, it was shown that the magician’s gaze
cues influenced both what people saw, as well as where they were
looking (Kuhn et al., 2009). Cui et al. (2011) on the other hand,
argue that, at least in some routines, perception of magic can be
stronger without social cues. Their conclusion is based on findings
from the vanishing coin trick, in which the magician either tosses
a coin for real, or merely pretends to toss it from one hand to the
other. Immediately prior to the toss the magician’s gaze is directed
toward the observer, and it was thought that this direct eye gaze
would capture participants’ attention and thus prevent them from
distinguishing between the real and the fake toss. The magician’s
joint attention cues were manipulated by occluding his head using
an artificial mask. They found that subjects did not direct their gaze
at the magicians face at the time of the toss, and that the illusion
was strongest in the presentations where the magician’s head was
occluded. These results suggest that joint attention plays no role in
the perception of this effect. However, it should be noted that the
mask itself may have captured people’s attention and thus misdi-
rected them from the method. As acknowledged by the authors,
further research in which the magician’s gaze is experimentally
manipulated is required before any final conclusions about the
use of social cues in this illusion can be drawn. However, on the
whole, the scientific evidence supports the notion that social cues
play a pivotal role in misdirection.
Anecdotal evidence from magicians suggests that not every-
one is equally deceived by misdirection. To date, however, there is
only one experimental study that has investigated individual differ-
ences in misdirection. Individuals with autism have rather specific
impairments in processing social information, and it is thought
that these individuals tend to avoid social information (Nation
and Penny, 2008), and in particular tend to be less effective at
using joint attention (Leekam et al., 1998). Given the importance
that social cues play in misdirecting attention, it was predicted
that individuals with autism should be less misdirected and thus
less susceptible toward theVanishing Ball illusion. However,rather
surprisingly, it was shown that individuals with autism did make
use of the social cues, and in fact were more susceptible toward
the Vanishing Ball illusion (Kuhn et al., 2010). This study further
highlighted that individuals with autism had particular difficulties
in allocating attention fast enough to the relevant location, which
may have resulted in higher levels of deception. We are obviously
only at the beginning of understanding some of the individual
differences in susceptibility toward misdirection,but misdirection
clearly offers a valuable tool to investigate individual differences
in attentional allocation.
Otero-Millan et al. (2011), investigated the effectiveness of dif-
ferent types of motion trajectories in misdirecting attention. These
authors showed that curved motion resulted in different types of
eye movements (more smooth pursuit) than rectilinear motion,
and participants were less likely to look back at the hand from
which attention was being misdirected. These findings offer a valu-
able starting point for investigating the way in which different
movements influence attention.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
From this review it is apparent that the recent interest in the sci-
ence of magic has lead to great advances in understanding some
of the brain mechanisms involved in misdirection. More impor-
tantly, the scientific investigations into misdirection have greatly
furthered our understanding of visual cognition and perception
in general. That said, this science of magic is clearly in its infancy,
leaving much scope for future explorations. What direction should
this field of study take? One obvious step would be to establish a
taxonomy and more unifying theory of misdirection. There are
several theoretical texts which try to conceptualize misdirection
(Fitzkee, 1945;Sharpe, 1988;Tamariz, 1988, 2007;Ortiz, 2006),
however, most knowledge and experience about misdirection is
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Kuhn and Martinez Misdirection
described within the context of specific magic tricks (e.g., Gan-
son, 1980). Whereas it is debatable whether such an all-inclusive
theory of misdirection is feasible (Lamont et al., 2010), a com-
prehensive, and up to date review of the magic literature focusing
on misdirection would certainly be a valuable starting point for
future scientific explorations. Crucially, it would at least make
this knowledge accessible to researchers with little background
in magic. Whilst some attempts have been made to bridge the gap
between magic and science (Fraps, 1998;Lamont and Wiseman,
1999;Macknik et al., 2010), most theory to date has been written
from the perspective of the magician, rather than the scientist. A
wide-ranging review of the literature on misdirection would cer-
tainly require and benefit from the close collaboration between the
two fields.
In addition, further steps should be taken in understanding the
cognitive as well as neural mechanisms involved in misdirection.
Magicians are primarily interested in discovering powerful and
reliable ways of manipulating the audiences’ awareness. As scien-
tists, on the other hand, we are interested in understanding the
underlying brain mechanisms of this deception. In principle, they
could be at a perceptual level or involve higher cognitive processes,
such as working memory or attentional mechanisms. For exam-
ple, Apollo Robins’ intuition that misdirection is stronger when the
magician draws attention into a small frame could be reminiscent
of a recent report showing that, in monkey primary visual cor-
tex (V1), increasing task difficulty enhances neuronal firing rate
at the focus of attention and suppresses it in regions surrounding
the focus (Chen et al., 2008). Similar center–surround mecha-
nisms of spatial attention (Moran and Desimone, 1985;Tre u e
and Maunsell, 1996;Reynolds et al., 1999;Recanzone and Wurtz,
2000;Martinez-Trujillo and Treue, 2002;Ghose and Maunsell,
2008) have been reported previously in different visual cortical
areas, including V4 (Sundberg et al., 2009) and even in motion
processing areas such as hMT+/V5 (Moutsiana et al., 2011), It
is, therefore, even possible that active and passive, or overt and
covert, forms of misdirection have different neural correlates.
Thus, magical techniques offer a unique test bed for current the-
ories of visual perception, attention, and awareness. If used in a
controlled laboratory environment, they will certainly shed new
light on highly debated perceptual phenomena such as change
blindness, inattentional blindness, and others.As suggested above,
whilst some of the mechanism used by magicians are likely to be
the same as those used in traditional experimental paradigms (e.g.,
attentional orientating by gaze cues), others may differ and may
be specific to magic (e.g., social conformity). Only future research
will inform us about the exact relationship between misdirection
and other attentional manipulations. We do not argue that misdi-
rection is a concept entirely removed from what has been studied
by scientists in the past. The main advantage of studying mis-
direction is that it allows us to exploit the magicians’ real-world
experience in attentional manipulation, and as such may inform
us about the aspects of the environment responsible for driving
attention in the real-world.
Misdirection will only be truly understood through empirical
investigations using a broad range of new paradigms, each with
their own and unique merits and pitfalls (Kuhn et al.,2008a;Mack-
nik et al., 2008;Barnhart, 2010). These new avenues of research
will permit to address countless unanswered questions that remain
to be explored. What makes the techniques used in misdirection
such powerful tools to manipulate spatial attention? Can we iden-
tify new attentional principles used by magicians, yet ignored by
scientist? How does the context in which the magician is observed
influence misdirection? How do magicians control the“collective
attention”in an audience? Is this a self-organizing process, alike to
what happens when an audience turns into synchronized clapping
at the end of a play in a theater? What are the neural correlates of
these synchronizing strategies employed by magicians? The answer
to these questions, and many others,may be just a few steps away if
we adopt magical techniques, such as those used in misdirection,
as part of our laboratory toolkit to investigate sensory awareness.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Work in the laboratory of Luis M. Martinez is supported by grants
CONSOLIDER CSD2007-00023 (European Regional Develop-
ment Fund) and BFU2007-67834 and BFU2010-22220 (Spanish
Ministry of Education and Science).
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Conflict of Interest Statement: The
authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any
commercial or financial relationships
that could be construed as a potential
conflict of interest.
Received: 20 June 2011; accepted: 12
December 2011; published online: 06 Jan-
uary 2012.
Citation: Kuhn G and Martinez LM
(2012) Misdirection – past, present, and
the future. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 5:172.
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00172
Copyright © 2012 Kuhn and Martinez.
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