Advantage Of Attention

Attention is a limited resource. Most of the time, people are interested in figuring out how best to use attention to our advantage: how to make sure we are registering the important things, while paying less care to other, less salient stimuli. Being able to effectively control attention contributes to our ability to study well and react quickly to new stimuli in the environment. However, there are also circumstances in which people would want to use the limited resource of attention to distract and trick people. Magicians, for example, take advantage of people’s limited attention. According to the Posner model, the attentional network has three main modules: alerting, orienting, and executive attention (Demacheva et. al, 2012). These modules …show more content…
They hypothesized that “the timing of the critical maneuver would be essential, but not sufficient, to identify the modus operandi of the illusion” (Demacheva et. al, 2012). Furthermore, they hypothesized that because the alerting and orienting aspects of attention function independently, magicians would manipulate each in a way that would cause people to not see the trick take place. Additionally, researchers asked if having participants write down an explanation of the trick after it was viewed would make them less likely to consider alternative explanations for how the trick was performed later. To conduct this experiment, researchers created an online survey that included a video of a magic trick. For this particular study, the video was of a magician vanishing a pen. Throughout the experiment, participants watched the video clip multiple times and responded to various questions about methods used in the trick and their confidence levels. Overall, researcher findings included: participants who were able to correctly identify the time the pen vanished were more likely to be able to accurately explain the trick, and previous knowledge of magic correlated with higher confidence scores.. These findings led them to conclude …show more content…
Is the question an interesting one, and is it framed properly? The questions asked in this research article are very interesting, mainly because they seek to examine a really popular phenomenon. Most people have, at some point in their lives, witnessed and been tricked by a magical illusion. Is the hypothesis valid and defensible? Are the methods appropriate to address the question? The methods appear to appropriately address the question. The sample size was quite large, and even though relying on self-report can be dangerous, it was particularly important to do so in this study because part of what they were looking at was how people reasoned through illusions. By looking not only at if people were correctly able to explain a trick or not, but also at previous knowledge and willingness to change explanations, researchers were not only able to study different aspects of attention, but also how people perceived their own