Psychic fraud

Finally, an understanding of the techniques used to fake psychic ability may yield insight into the types of cognitive and social biases that disrupt perception, reasoning and memory. Cognitive psychologists attempt to understand how observers attend to, perceive, comprehend and store information from the environment. In addition, they are also concerned with how this information is recalled and utilised during thinking and problem solving. Research into psychic fraud may reveal novel types of bias and, like the study of optical illusions can provide important new insights into the weaknesses of human information processing. Also, the further analysis of psychic fraud may allow cognitive psychologists to undertake research into novel areas of enquiry which are recognised as important but, up to this point in time, have proved problematic to investigate.