well.. the trick sucked, but the other colour changes slipped straight past me, didn't notice any of them

The psychology isn't hard - the brain isn't focused on the colour of the backgrounds/clothes/table so they barely register in our memory, after the switch it assumes it was always that way because it has no reason to doubt that and is too busy focused on the distraction (the card trick)

I don't see the relevance to eye-witnessing, if you saw a crime in progress and had your head screwed on right you'd be fully focused on remembering every detail of the scene, especially the criminals. Although even then memory is flawed because its not set up (evolutionarily speaking) to be a precise record of events, more a way of generating patterns to help anticipate the future, so your memory can be affected by what you expect would have happened, so long as its not too far off from "normal" (in which case it would gain extra significance)

I didn't notice the colour changes either, but I did notice the tighter camera angles and thought WTF? why are they doing that...

Distraction of attention is the key to all magic tricks...

Did you notice the Gorilla suit  at the left side of the screen in the "larger picture"  That's what led me to selecting the title I did.

I'm not positive that it was put there for this particular reason, but I suspect that it was as a kind of an 'in joke" to the psychology crowd and/or criminolgy set.

..... there is a famous film of a university class (criminology I believe it was) where the professor had a student in a Gorilla suit cross the stage during a lecture where the topic of note was the reliabilty of eye witness accounts of crime scenes in public venues. Many years now since i saw it, but I think the set up was a that they had a mock crime enacted on stage  and the class was asked questions about the event afterwards... [the gorrila streaked by  in the background] .. as I recall most of the class ,in questioning about the details of the staged crime, totally missed the presence of the gorilla...thus indicating the extreme fallibility of eye witnesses in court cases....(other tests have shown that what the witness 'saw' is greatly dependent on ideas put in their head by their interrogators).

My friend went to a Dr Karl show where he talked about something like this.. perception/expectancy bias.

The audience watched a video and  were told to watch closely what was going on, as their would be questions at the end...

During the video,  a guy in a gorilla suit ran into the back of the shot.. jumped around for a second and then ran off.

at the end of the video, Dr Karl asked questions, my friend and a handful of others were the only ones who saw the Gorilla

and yes I saw the gorilla too

Can I just say I noticed it?

wait, was the gorilla involved except for being stood there in the wide shot? If he appeared in the original shot then I really wasn't looking hard enough

No only in the wide shot... but I suspect he was there as an 'inside' joke.

I noticed the colour change - too much Psych!

Still i wouldn't make a good witness - research shows that.

Even the phrasing of a question can influence a witness's memory. Even if your head was screwed on right - you'd miss a lot of the details that you want to be focussing on - not just cause of memory issues - but cause things happen so fast that not everything can register and the brain fills up the missing details all the time.

"The brain fills in missing details all the time"

Exactly.  Our brains are pattern matchers ... and when no pattern fits, we generate the bits needed to fit a pattern as quickly as we can .... and then we often have trouble 'breaking'  a false match even as new evidence becomes available... all kinds of other factors can influence this but this is the crux of it... and the more focused we are on fine details of something the more likley we are to miss a 'big picture' item happening simulateously.

As you indicate, the phrasing of the question is an important factor... in the title of this topic I took some of the focus away from just the cards ... If I had said something along the lines of 'can you see the switch of the cards'  the likelyhood of catching the other colour changes would have been less....

one study  with kids passing  basketballs back and forth gave totally different results depending whether or not viewiers had been given instructions to "count the passes" or not.  In the later case virtually everyone saw a 'gorilla' walk between the kids with the basketballs while nearly half of those who were asked to count the passes totally missed the gorilla (and there was nothing quick or unobtusive about the 'gorilla' - you couldn't possibly miss it; except for the nearly 50% of the people who got so focused on counting passes that they literally couldn't see anything else).

the gorilla so completely fails to fit into the pattern that the brain must just fill in the gorilla shaped patch of sky with what it expects to be there

case in point: every time you move your head around quickly, you're temporarily blind to prevent motion sickness, but your brain fills in what it expects to see

and there's only a small part of your field of vision in good focus at any one time (that area constantly moves), the brain sort of paints in the focused image gathered on the previous sweep to build up a complete, focused image

Although even then memory is flawed because its not set up (evolutionarily speaking) to be a precise record of events, more a way of generating patterns to help anticipate the future, so your memory can be affected by what you expect would have happened, so long as its not too far off from "normal" (in which case it would gain extra significance)

I thought that was so interesting and then the conversation it led to... Fascinating stuff.

Yes.

adding on to the phrasing of questions - lots of Psych and Law research is does on eye witness reliability with regards to question asking.

They found that lawyers use this tool all the time during trials without properly realising the vulnerability of the witness but completely capitalising on the phenomenon. It's called the Misinformation effect.

 Say for example the incident is a car crash.

one week later - participants were asked more questions.

One of the questions was - did you see any broken glass?

HIghest percentage yes was in the group that was asked the week before "how fast were the cars going when they smashed?" 

This Experiment was done back in the 70s by Loftus and Palmer. Not sure of follow ups since then in recent times.

Still was interesting to read how one word could change the perception of the witness.

Btw - there was no broken glass at the scene 

In the United States, where there has been a spate of cases have been overturned due to "new evidence", its been reported that fully 85% of cases where DNA has resulted in overturning of a conviction the initial conviction  involved a mistaken eyewitness.

You'd think the courts would have figured that out sooner..... given tendency of humans to embellish when recounting the simplest of incidents

*shrug*