The apparent action causation: Using a magician forcing technique to investigate our illusory sense of agency over the outcome of our choices

Beyond the Tricks: The Science and Comparative Cognition of Magic

Magic is an art form that has fascinated humans for centuries. Recently, the techniques used by magicians to make their audience experience the impossible have attracted the attention of psychologists, who, in just a couple of decades, have produced a large amount of research regarding how these effects operate, focusing on the blind spots in perception and roadblocks in cognition that magic techniques exploit. Most recently, this investigation has given a pathway to a new line of research that uses magic effects to explore the cognitive abilities of nonhuman animals. This new branch of the scientific study of magic has already yielded new evidence illustrating the power of magic effects as a psychological tool for nonhuman animals. This review aims to give a thorough overview of the research on both the human and nonhuman perception of magic effects by critically illustrating the most prominent works of both fields of inquiry.

Visual Cognition and the Science of Magic

A number of authors have argued that the art of conjuring can assist the development of theories and knowledge in visual cognition and psychology more broadly. A central assumption of the so-called science of magic is that magicians possess particular insight into human cognition. In a series of experiments, we tested the Insight hypothesis by assessing three factors that magicians argue are important for a popular illusion. Participants viewed videos of a magician performing the French Drop sleight whilst gaze, motion, and muscular tension were manipulated across experiments. Contrary to what the community of conjurers state, results showed that none of these influenced the perceived success of the effect. We also found that a visual priming technique, one suggested of many and used by an eminent magician, does not influence participant responses. Overall, these findings fail to support the Insight hypothesis. We suggest that scientists of magic have erroneously imbued magicians with insights they do not possess.

Fooling System 1 in the field of perception: Failure to intuitively detect attribute substitution in the flushtration count illusion

To facilitate our interactions with the surroundings, the human brain sometimes reshapes the situations that it faces to simplify them. This phenomenon has been widely studied in the context of reasoning, especially through the attribute substitution error. It has however been given much less attention in the field of perception. Recent research on the bat-and-ball problem suggests that reasoners are able to intuitively detect attribute substitution errors. Using a perceptual illusion drawn from the field of magic, we investigate the extent to which a perceptual form of attribute substitution depends on executive resources and can be detected. We also investigate the relationship between susceptibility to attribute substitution error in the flushtration count illusion and in a French adaptation of the bat-and-ball problem. Finally, we investigate the link between the intuitive cognitive style (assessed by the cognitive reflection test) and the susceptibility to the flushtration count illusion. Our results suggest that participants do not detect perceptual attribute substitution error, that this phenomenon could be independent of the executive resources allocated to the task, and could rest on mechanisms distinct from those that produce errors in reasoning. We discuss differences between these two phenomena, and factors that may explain them.

Exploring the perceptual inabilities of Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) using magic effects

In recent years, scientists have begun to use magic effects to investigate the blind spots in our attention and perception [G. Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic (2019); S. Macknik, S. Martinez-Conde, S. Blakeslee, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions (2010)]. Recently, we suggested that similar techniques could be transferred to nonhuman animal observers and that such an endeavor would provide insight into the inherent commonalities and discrepancies in attention and perception in human and nonhuman animals [E. Garcia-Pelegrin, A. K. Schnell, C. Wilkins, N. S. Clayton, Science 369, 1424-1426 (2020)]. Here, we performed three different magic effects (palming, French drop, and fast pass) to a sample of six Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius). These magic effects were specifically chosen as they utilize different cues and expectations that mislead the spectator into thinking one object has or has not been transferred from one hand to the other. Results from palming and French drop experiments suggest that Eurasian jays have different expectations from humans when observing some of these effects. Specifically, Eurasian jays were not deceived by effects that required them to expect an object to move between hands when observing human hand manipulations. However, similar to humans, Eurasian jays were misled by magic effects that utilize fast movements as a deceptive action. This study investigates how another taxon perceives the magician's techniques of deception that commonly deceive humans.

Mind Control Tricks: Magicians' Forcing and Free Will

A new research program has recently emerged that investigates magicians' mind control tricks, also called forces. This research highlights the psychological processes that underpin decision-making, illustrates the ease by which our decisions can be covertly influenced, and helps answer questions about our sense of free will and agency over choices.

Influencing choices with conversational primes: How a magic trick unconsciously influences card choices

Past research demonstrates that unconscious primes can affect people's decisions. However, these free choice priming paradigms present participants with very few alternatives. Magicians' forcing techniques provide a powerful tool to investigate how natural implicit primes can unconsciously influence decisions with multiple alternatives. We used video and live performances of the mental priming force. This technique uses subtle nonverbal and verbal conversational primes to influence spectators to choose the three of diamonds. Our results show that a large number of participants chose the target card while reporting feeling free and in control of their choice. Even when they were influenced by the primes, participants typically failed to give the reason for their choice. These results show that naturally embedding primes within a person's speech and gestures effectively influenced people's decision making. This raises the possibility that this form of mind control could be used to effectively manipulate other mental processes.