What Is Selective Priming?

Magician’s exploit the limitations of attentional and perceptual systems. They manipulate a process of selective attention; priming, resulting in inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness describes the inability of a person to notice an unexpected object that is fully visible (Carpenter, 2001). Priming is an alteration in the identification or production of an item due to prior exposure (Tulving & Schacter, 1990). There are many different types of priming. This essay examines selective priming and a subtype of selective priming; expectation based priming. Priming of stimuli, can explain how inattentional blindness occurs. The vanishing ball illusion demonstrates how magicians implement priming to achieve inattentional blindness, thus …show more content…
One directs their attention a stimulus, whilst a different stimulus changes. Inattentional blindness is the result of relying on expectations to perceive stimuli (Cherry, 2014). Take, for example Simons & Chabri’s study. In their study, observers counted the amount of times a basketball team passed a ball to each other. Participants ignored a separate team passing a ball at the same time. Few observers, noticed the man wearing a gorilla suit walking across the screen. Observers failed to notice the gorilla because; it is unlikely that this would occur in the real world (Cherry, 2014). It did not fall within their expectations/schema; therefore, observers did not pay attention to the gorilla. Thus, the observer was inattentionally blind to the gorilla (Cherry, 2014).
Selective Priming of feature detectors explains why inattentional blindness occurs. Selective priming states, the expectations towards stimuli can prime certain feature detectors (Most, Scholl, Clifford, & Simons, 2005; Simons & Jensen, 2009). People experiencing inattentional blindness; do not expect the stimulus to appear. As a result, unprepared detectors perceive a presented stimulus. People fail to detect the stimulus. Therefore, they suffer inattentional