Friday Illusion: Coin magic trick reveals brain fail

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV

Can you predict if a coin will land heads or tails? Watch the video above and see if you're up to the tricky task.

Created by John Henderson from the University of South Carolina and colleagues, the clip shows how you can be oblivious to an object changing right before your eyes when your attention is focused on another aspect of the same object. The coin presented is secretly switched before the toss but most viewers don't notice the substitution the first time they see the trick. When instructed to look out for it, it then becomes obvious.

Although it may be surprising for our brain to miss such an obvious change, the strategy helps filter out unwanted information. "The advantage of a well-developed attentional system is that the brain can bring its processing power to bear on relevant information while excluding irrelevant or distracting information," says Henderson. "But the downside is that if the filtered information becomes relevant, or changes, we might miss it."

The phenomenon, called change blindness, is similar to the 'gorilla in our midst' psychology experiment where people often don't see a man in a gorilla suit when counting the number of times a ball is passed around. But whereas the disguised man isn't the focus of attention, in this case you're blind to a feature of something you're staring at. The goal of the coin toss trick was to study the effect using a simple task where attention and fixation are coupled, since other investigations have used busier visual scenes.

Henderson and his team are now looking at how our eyes are directed to relevant information around us and how we choose what to pay attention to. "We're looking at what happens to both attended and unattended information, and change blindness is one way to get at this question," he says.

Were you fooled by the coin toss? Let us know in the comments section below.

If you enjoyed this post, check out our previous Friday Illusions to see, for example, how a morphing face can become invisible.?

Journal reference: Perception, DOI:10.1068/p7092

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/2150edbc/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cnstv0C20A120C0A70Cfriday0Eillusion0Ecoin0Emagic0Etrick0Ereveals0Ebrain0Efail0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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