TY - JOUR
T1 - Microsaccades reflect the dynamics of misdirected attention in magic
AU - Barnhart, Anthony S.
AU - Martinez-Conde, Susana
AU - Macknik, Stephen L.
AU - Costela, Francisco M.
AU - Goldinger, Stephen D.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported in part by NICHD Grant R01 HD075800-01 to Stephen D. Goldinger, National Science Foundation Award 1523614 to Stephen L. Macknik, and National Science Foundation Award 1734887 to Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde. We thank Dr. Gustav Kuhn and an anonymous reviewer for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts and Dr. Michael B. McCamy for valuable discussions and help with data analyses.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019,Journal of Eye Movement Research All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - 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 com-bined results indicate that microsaccades may be a useful metric of covert attentional processes in applied and ecologically valid settings.
AB - 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 com-bined results indicate that microsaccades may be a useful metric of covert attentional processes in applied and ecologically valid settings.
KW - Eye movements
KW - attention
KW - divided attention
KW - eye tracking
KW - magic
KW - microsaccades
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U2 - 10.16910/jemr.12.6.7
DO - 10.16910/jemr.12.6.7
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85102786282
SN - 1995-8692
VL - 12
SP - 1
EP - 14
JO - Journal of Eye Movement Research
JF - Journal of Eye Movement Research
IS - 6
ER -