Alan H wrote:It's a bit like the ape walking through the scene while counting the baseball passes, but no where near as startling. I counted 16 as well...
Not sure about that, Alan. With the ape one is looking at a fairly wide field of vision, watching the ball moving around - even close to the ape.
In this case there are two areas of focus, the hand dealing the cards and the cards themselves. Asked to look for red cards I focussed my visual attention, centre of vision (quite small area), on the faces of the cards as they landed. The peripheral visual field was not of importance to the requested task.
Getting onto nasty subjects: when in the RAF we were given instruction on battlefield observation, taught to alternate our attention between our designated focus (most) and the wider area (least) because one could not extract detail from both at the same time. If there is a gross event in the peripheral field of vision one logs it but it may not be relevant to the designated task. Training helps make that decision - an explosion seen to one side usually means you were not the target and have survived (two explosions, getting closer, mean something else!) A tank approaching might mean time to take evasive action!
In this case I would suggest the "message" was in the "peripheral field" in both the visual and psychological sense.
Interesting subject to consider and plays an important part in witness account analysis I would guess.
Edit: meant to say that if there really were 16 red cards then I don't think much of the so-called mentalist! Can't even count.
"Look forward; yesterday was a lesson, if you did not learn from it you wasted it."
Me, 2015