Magicians use misdirection to prevent you from realizing the methods used to create a magical effect, thereby allowing you to experience an apparently impossible event. Magicians have acquired much knowledge about misdirection, and have suggested several taxonomies of misdirection. These describe many of the fundamental principles in misdirection, focusing on how misdirection is achieved by magicians. In this article we review the strengths and weaknesses of past taxonomies, and argue that a more natural way of making sense of misdirection is to focus on the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved. Our psychologically-based taxonomy has three basic categories, corresponding to the types of psychological mechanisms affected: perception, memory, and reasoning. Each of these categories is then divided into subcategories based on the mechanisms that control these effects. This new taxonomy can help organize magicians' knowledge of misdirection in a meaningful way, and facilitate the dialog between magicians and scientists.
When people view images, their saccades are predominantly horizontal and show a positively skewed distribution of amplitudes. How are these patterns affected by the information close to fixation and the features in the periphery? We recorded saccades while observers encoded a set of scenes with a gaze-contingent window at fixation: Features inside a rectangular (Experiment 1) or elliptical (Experiment 2) window were intact; peripheral background was masked completely or blurred. When the window was asymmetric, with more information preserved either horizontally or vertically, saccades tended to follow the information within the window, rather than exploring unseen regions, which runs counter to the idea that saccades function to maximize information gain on each fixation. Window shape also affected fixation and amplitude distributions, but horizontal windows had less of an impact. The findings suggest that saccades follow the features currently being processed and that normal vision samples these features from a horizontally elongated region.
The accuracy and efficiency of two types of subiterations in both explicit and implicit Navier-Stokes codes are explored for unsteady laminar circular-cylinder flow and unsteady turbulent flow over an 18-percent-thick circular-arc (biconvex) airfoil. Grid and time-step studies are used to assess the numerical accuracy of the methods. Nonsubiterative time-stepping schemes and schemes with physical time subiterations are subject to time-step limitations in practice that are removed by pseudo time subiterations. Computations for the circular-arc airfoil indicate that a one-equation turbulence model predicts the unsteady separated flow better than an algebraic turbulence model; also, the hysteresis with Mach number of the self-excited unsteadiness due to shock and boundary-layer separation is well predicted.ations to advance the equations of motion in a time-accurate manner. Two approaches to performing sub-code CFL3D % are both used in conjunction with subiter-*Senior Member AIAA. ?Associate Fellow AIAA.
Previous research has revealed marked improvements in cognitive control between the age of 10 years and adulthood. The aim of the current study was to explore differences in attentional control between adults and children within a natural context, namely whilst they were watching a magic trick. We measured participants' eye movements whilst they watched a misdirection trick in which attentional misdirection was used to prevent observers from noticing a salient visual event. Half of our participants failed to detect this event even though it took place in full view. Children below the age of 10 were significantly less likely to notice the event than the adults and were also more reliably overtly misdirected (i.e., where they looked). Our results illustrate that within a more naturalistic context children are significantly more distracted than adults, and this distraction can have major implications on their visual awareness.
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