Misdirection, attention and awareness: Inattentional blindness reveals temporal relationship between eye movements and visual awareness

Abstract

We designed a magic trick that could be used to investigate how misdirection can prevent people from perceiving a visually salient event, thus offering a novel paradigm to examine inattentional blindness. We demonstrate that participants’ verbal reports reflect what they saw rather than inferences about how they thought the trick was done and thus provide a reliable index of conscious perception. Eye movements revealed that for a subset of participants their conscious perception was not related to where they were looking at the time of the event and thus demonstrate how overt and covert attention can be spatially dissociated. However, detection of the event resulted in rapid shifts of eye movements towards the detected event, thus indicating a strong temporal link between overt and covert attention, and that covert attention can be allocated at least 2 or 3 saccade targets ahead of where people are fixating.

Keywords:

• Covert attention
• Overt attention
• Inattentional blindness
• Misdirection
• Eye movements
• Visual awareness

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Wolfson Research Institute, University of Durham. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

¹ In the previous studies, the disappearance of the lighter was used as misdirection so as to prevent participants from detecting the visible cigarette drop. In the present study we designed a new misdirection trick in which only one object—namely, a lighter—disappeared. The simplicity of this trick was thought to further reduce any confusion between perception and inference.