Misdirection, attention and awareness: Inattentional blindness reveals temporal relationship between eye movements and visual awareness

We designed a magic trick that could be used to investigate how misdirection can prevent people from perceiving a visually salient event, thus offering a novel paradigm to examine inattentional blindness. We demonstrate that participants' verbal reports reflect what they saw rather than inferences about how they thought the trick was done and thus provide a reliable index of conscious perception. Eye movements revealed that for a subset of participants their conscious perception was not related to where they were looking at the time of the event and thus demonstrate how overt and covert attention can be spatially dissociated. However, detection of the event resulted in rapid shifts of eye movements towards the detected event, thus indicating a strong temporal link between overt and covert attention, and that covert attention can be allocated at least 2 or 3 saccade targets ahead of where people are fixating.