The Phantom Vanish Magic Trick: Investigating the Disappearance of a Non-existent Object in a Dynamic Scene

Abstract

Drawing inspiration from sleight-of-hand magic tricks, we developed an experimental paradigm to investigate whether magicians’ misdirection techniques could be used to induce the misperception of “phantom” objects. While previous experiments investigating sleight-of-hand magic tricks have focused on creating false assumptions about the movement of an object in a scene, our experiment investigated creating false assumptions about the presence of an object in a scene. Participants watched a sequence of silent videos depicting a magician performing with a single object. Following each video, participants were asked to write a description of the events in the video. In the final video, participants watched the Phantom Vanish Magic Trick, a novel magic trick developed for this experiment, in which the magician pantomimed the actions of presenting an object and then making it magically disappear. No object was presented during the final video. The silent videos precluded the use of false verbal suggestions, and participants were not asked leading questions about the objects. Nevertheless, 32% of participants reported having visual impressions of non-existent objects. These findings support an inferential model of perception, wherein top-down expectations can be manipulated by the magician to generate vivid illusory experiences, even in the absence of corresponding bottom-up information.

Model of information process for neuromagic

“…Over the last few years, the field of neuroscience has developed a branch based on the combination of both magicians and neuroscientists knowledge-"neuromagic"- (Tompkins et al, 2016;Shalom et al, 2013;Kuhn et al, 2008;Rissanen et al, 2014;Lamont & Henderson, 2009;Olson et al, 2015;Rensink & Kuhn, 2015;Ekroll et al, 2017;Barak & Tsodyks, 2014;Kuhn, 2019). The goal of magicians is to surprise their audience and to do so, they create magic tricks that are increasingly impressive.…”

On the cognitive bases of illusionism

“…Experimentally, it has been reported that social cues, beyond gaze location, can manipulate the audience's attention effectively (Kuhn & Tatler, 2005;Kuhn et al, 2008a;Kuhn, Amlani & Rensink, 2008b). In general, social cues strengthen the effectiveness of the magic effects, can be imposed on explicit instructions and allow manipulating the audience's expectations (Cui et al, 2011;Hergovich & Oberfichtner, 2016;Kuhn & Land, 2006;Kuhn, Tatler & Cole, 2009;Kuhn & Teszka, 2015;Kuhn & Rensink, 2016;Rieiro, Martinez-Conde & Macknik, 2013;Scott, Batten & Kuhn, 2019;Tachibana & Kawabata, 2014;Thomas & Didierjean, 2016a, 2016bTompkins, Woods & Aimola Davies, 2016).…”

Among the two kinds of metacognitive evaluation, only one is predictive of illusory object perception

“…Predictive coding models of perception suggest that perception is determined by the relative weighting of sensory data and expectations (Friston, 2005;Hohwy, 2013;Clark, 2015, O'Callaghan et al, 2017. Depending on this relative weighting, the subjective perception depends more on actual sensory evidence or on prior knowledge; prior knowledge dominates perception when sensory data is degraded Powers et al, 2017) or ambiguous (Sterzer, Frith, & Petrovic, 2008;Weilnhammer et al, 2018) or when there is a strong prior (Kuhn & Rensink, 2016;Tompkins et al, 2016). Hallucinatory experiences speak about a disbalance between the effects of priors and actual sensory inflow data processing.…”