misdirection: a standalone construct

Misdirection is the conjuror's control of where a spectator looks, attends, and reasons, so that the method of a trick unfolds outside awareness even when it happens in plain sight. The modern cognitive literature treats it as a family of techniques that exploit covert attention, change blindness, and expectation rather than merely moving the eyes, and Kuhn, Caffaratti, Teszka, and Rensink's A psychologically-based taxonomy of misdirection sorts these into perceptual, memory, and reasoning forms. Macknik and colleagues' Attention and awareness in stage magic and Kuhn, Amlani, and Rensink's Towards a science of magic argue that studying misdirection gives attention research a ready-made toolkit for dissociating what we look at from what we see. The referent is the directed allocation of a perceiver's attention, measured by eye-tracking and detection failures.[1][2][3]

Unit

The share of spectators who miss a method performed in view

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied with eye-tracking, change- and inattentional-blindness tasks, and post-trick detection and recall probes