How do magicians misdirect the audiences attentional spotlight?
Magicians can effectively control an object’s salience by manipulating the audience’s bottom-up and/or top-down attentional control mechanisms. Objects that are new, unusual, of high contrast or moving are salient, and the audience’s attention is more strongly drawn towards them. such object properties induce bottom-up control of attention (and are used to accomplish ‘passive misdirection’ in magic theory7, 56 or ‘exogenous attentional capture’ in psychology) because the attention is driven by increased activity in the ascending sensory system. One way in which a magician might control bottom-up attention is by suddenly producing a flying dove. The spectators’ gaze and attention will focus on the dove’s flight, and this will give the magician a few unattended moments in which he or she can conduct a secret manoeuvre.Another facet of bottom-up attention that magicians exploit is the fact that if more than one movement is visible, spectators will tend to follow the larger (that is, the m
