@article{e87227bc-f75e-4e52-ba99-870fc03c21e1,
  abstract     = {{In 1887, psychical researchers Richard Hodgson and S. J. Davey published a study that revealed counterintuitive aspects of human cognition: How healthy, sober, honest observers of events can be prone to seemingly remarkable errors of eyewitness testimony. Their report, titled ‘The Possibilities of Mal-Observation and Lapse of Memory from a Practical Point of View’ included a collection of eyewitness statements from participants in a series of hoax séances. Hodgson and Davey asserted that all phenomena in their séances were produced using techniques drawn from performance magic. However, their participants were not initially informed about this fact. In their accounts, participants consistently attributed events that they saw, not to trickery, but to spiritual phenomena and psychic powers on the part of Davey, who played the role of the ‘medium’. A major advantage this novel paradigm was that the experimenters had a highly reliable record of actual events, because they had orchestrated the séances themselves. Their paper emphasised the contrasts between what their participants reported remembering relative to what had actually occurred. The errors of the witnesses were marked by failures to notice or remember key aspects of the séance, and even instances where the participants seemed to confabulate- confidently reporting events that had never really taken place. Neither Hodgson nor Davey would have identified themselves as psychologists or cognitive scientists, rather they considered themselves to be psychical researchers, operating under the auspices of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). At the time, experimental psychology was only just beginning to emerge as a formal and distinct academic discipline. But looking back on their work from a modern perspective, it arguably anticipated more formal theoretical and empirical developments in cognitive psychology by decades. Ironically, given that their report systematically documented failures of attention and lapses of memory, it has been largely ignored in historical considerations of psychology research and is relatively unknown today. In this paper, I will explore the historical context of Hodgson and Davey’s report and discuss how some of their key findings can be related to our contemporary scientific understanding of attention, memory, metacognition, and the science of magic.}},
  author       = {{Tompkins, Matthew L.}},
  issn         = {{3066-5906}},
  keywords     = {{attention; memory; eyewitness testimony; psychical research; science of magic; illusion}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  month        = {{03}},
  pages        = {{1--23}},
  publisher    = {{Taylor & Francis}},
  series       = {{Advances in Nineteenth-Century Research}},
  title        = {{Haunted Histories of Experimental Psychology : A Re-Examination of Hodgson and Davey’s Mal-Observation Report}},
  url          = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/30665906.2025.2579758}},
  doi          = {{10.1080/30665906.2025.2579758}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}