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"People could be looking very close to where the cigarette was being dropped without even seeing it," he says. "Other people were looking quite far away but they did actually did spot the cigarette."
"What it shows is just how much of the picture in our head of our surroundings is a massive construction, based on expectations, what we think is important, what we normally encounter and so on," says Wiseman. "And that's what magicians are very good at exploiting."
Misdirection of an audience, therefore, depends on more than just making people look the wrong way - the truly successful magician misdirects attention. Often, attention is focused on where a person is looking, but this can be manipulated. "You might be looking at a scene and then you hear a voice from the back so your attention is moved towards the back and your processing of visual information will be impaired at the front," says Kuhn.
Verbal suggestion can also play a big role in misdirection. In a recent study, Wiseman looked at how the classic metal-bending tricks, employed by magicians the world over and perhaps made most famous by Uri Geller, used verbal cues. In his experiment, he showed a group of students a video of a trick where a magician bends a key, apparently using his psychokinetic ability (in fact, the bending was done by sleight of hand). The magician then placed the key on a table and the video ended with a static shot of the bent key, which did not bend any further. But a voiceover from the magician at this stage suggested that the key was indeed continuing to bend.
The results, published this year in the British Journal of Psychology, showed that 40% of people claimed to see the key continuing to bend during the static shot at the end of the video. In the control group, where there was no voiceover from the magician, only 5% reported that they saw the key continuing to bend.
Of course, suggestion can take other forms.
"With the ball experiment, we discovered that people aren't just looking up at the ball, they're looking at facial clues to judge where the ball is going to end up," says Kuhn. "If the magician doesn't look up in the air, the trick doesn't work. People feel that they're watching the ball but what they are doing is monitoring the magician's face and cues and using that information to guide their eye movements."