This trend towards a “science of magic” has continued throughout the past decade, with researchers adapting magic tricks to investigate a wide variety of cognitive mechanisms. By integrating eye-tracking with sleight-of-hand-based stimuli, this experiment arguably marks one of the first scientific examinations of magic to move beyond the domain of observations, reviews, and opinion pieces into formal empirical investigation. Kuhn and Tatler (2005) used an eye-tracking paradigm to examine participants who watched a simple magic trick involving the apparent disappearance of a cigarette and a lighter. The first scientific study of magic to implement physiological measurements of adults perceiving magic effects was not conducted until 2005. However, performance magic was largely ignored by the scientific community throughout the twentieth century ( Hyman, 1989). Magicians have spent millennia informally experimenting with perception, attention, and memory (e.g., Christopher and Christopher, 1973 Thomas et al., 2015), and theoretical writings on magic, dating back hundreds of years (e.g., Scot, 1584 Hodgson and Davey, 1887), anticipated recent scientific accounts of psychological phenomena.Įmpirical investigations of magic played a critical role in the establishment of Experimental Psychology as a scientific discipline (e.g., Wundt, 1879 see Figure 1), and early psychologists have written about the psychology of magic tricks ( Jastrow, 1888, 1896 Dessoir, 1893 Binet, 1896 Triplett, 1900 see also Lamont, 2010 Thomas et al., 2016). In particular, sleight-of-hand magic tricks provide a unique opportunity to investigate illusory perceptions of complex dynamic scenes. Performance magic, particularly sleight-of-hand or “conjuring,” represents a rich resource for experimental psychologists. The performance of magic is based on practical and theoretical knowledge of psychology (see Gregory, 1982 Kuhn et al., 2008 Macknik et al., 2008 Rensink and Kuhn, 2015). 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.
Nevertheless, 32% of participants reported having visual impressions of non-existent objects. The silent videos precluded the use of false verbal suggestions, and participants were not asked leading questions about the objects. No object was presented during the final 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. Following each video, participants were asked to write a description of the events in the video.
Participants watched a sequence of silent videos depicting a magician performing with a single object. 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.
3The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australiaĭrawing 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.2Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Oxford, UK.1Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
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