The Other Side of Magic

Abstract

When magicians perform spectacles that seem to defy the laws of nature, they do so by manipulating psychological reality. Hence, the principles underlying the art of conjuring are potentially of interest to psychological science. Here, we argue that perceptual and cognitive principles governing how humans experience hidden things and reason about them play a central role in many magic tricks. Different from tricks based on many other forms of misdirection, which require considerable skill on the part of the magician, many elements of these tricks are essentially self-working because they rely on automatic perceptual and cognitive processes. Since these processes are not directly observable, even experienced magicians may be oblivious to their central role in creating strong magical experiences and tricks that are almost impossible to debunk, even after repeated presentations. We delineate how insights from perceptual psychology provide a framework for understanding why these tricks work so well. Conversely, we argue that studying magic tricks that work much better than one intuitively would believe provides a promising heuristic for charting unexplored aspects of perception and cognition.

The Flushtration Count Illusion: Attribute substitution tricks our interpretation of a simple visual event sequence

“…Risen suggests that system 2 is not simply ‘slow and lazy’ it is also a bit of a ‘push over’, which explains why people maintain and endorse irrational beliefs they know to be wrong. We believe that the Flushtration Count Illusion belongs to one of these ‘irrational’ illusions; you ‘feel’ as if you have seen the card, even when you rationally know this was not the case (for other illustrations and discussions on the cognitive impenetrability of perception, see Ekroll, Sayim, & Wagemans, ; Firestone & Scholl, ; Pylyshyn, ).…”

Amodal Volume Completion and the Thin Building Illusion

“…Importantly, the illusory perceptual experiences of a rectangular cross section persist despite explicit conscious knowledge of the true triangular cross section. That is, these perceptual experiences are cognitively impenetrable ( Ekroll et al., 2013 , 2016; Ekroll, Sayim, & Wagemans, 2017 ; Firestone & Scholl, 2015 ; Kanizsa, 1985 ; Leslie, 1988 ; Nielsen, 2008 ; Pylyshyn, 1999 ).…”

“…The mental representation of the hidden parts of the jagged shape in Figure 11 may be better conceived of as a set of possible shapes than as a concrete, specific one. The notion of abstract and fuzzy representations in amodal perception has also been discussed in connection with the recently described phenomenon of amodal absence ( Ekroll et al., 2017 ). It is also worth noting that fuzzy perceptual representations are well known and seem to play an important role in other domains of perception such as peripheral vision ( Balas, Nakano, & Rosenholtz, 2009 ; Coates, Wagemans, & Sayim, 2017 ; Koenderink, Valsecchi, van Doorn, Wagemans, & Gegenfurtner, 2017 ; Sayim & Wagemans, 2017 ).…”

Prediction in goal-directed action

“…They may also rely on memory of the particular visual scene, such as the likelihood of an object of interest being at a particular location (Draschkow, Wolfe, & Võ, 2014;Henderson, 2017;Võ & Wolfe, 2015), or on the statistics of events or items typically encountered in such scenes (Diaz, Cooper, Rothkopf, & Hayhoe, 2013;Hayhoe, McKinney, Chajka, & Pelz, 2012). Predictions can be related to temporal factors (e.g., when will an object be within reach; Rodriguez-Herreros, de Grave, Lopez-Moliner, Brenner, & Smeets, 2013) as well as spatial representations (e.g., completion of occluded parts of an object; Ekroll, Sayim, & Wagemans, 2017;van Lier, 1999).…”