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Journal ArticleDOI

The Other Side of Magic.

11 Jan 2017-Perspectives on Psychological Science (Perspect Psychol Sci)-Vol. 12, Iss: 1, pp 91-106
TL;DR: It is argued that perceptual and cognitive principles governing how humans experience hidden things and reason about them play a central role in many magic tricks, and how insights from perceptual psychology provide a framework for understanding why these tricks work so well.
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.

Summary (1 min read)

Introduction

  • Note that these experiences are quite compelling even though you know very well that there is no complete triangle (in panel c) or cross (in panel d) behind your thumb.
  • It is also interesting to consider that with tricks based on attentional misdirection, every sense of magic is lost once you know how the trick works.

Cognitive impenetrability

  • The only reason why the upper figures look white while the lower figures look black is that they are viewed in different contexts (Anderson & Winawer, 2005; see also Adelson, 2000 and Gilchrist et al., 1999 for similar demonstrations).
  • Some effects of learning and knowledge on their mental processing of occluded objects have been documented, (Vrins et al., 2009, Hazenberg et al., 2014, Hazenberg & van Lier, 2015), but it can be discussed whether these effects are part of what should be called amodal perception proper.
  • When people try to debunk a trick based on amodal perception, the cognitively impenetrable illusion (or visual fixedness) closes the door to the right solution even before any conscious problem-solving even starts.
  • Visual fixedness and the cognitive impenetrability of perceptual mechanisms may be regarded as an extreme form of this kind of generation of false assumptions that may be critical to the robustness and potency of many magic tricks.
  • Based on this reasoning, investigating the effect of repeated presentations of magic tricks on the spectators’ likelihood of figuring out the method could be a promising tool for elucidating the nature of the mechanisms underlying different kinds of magic tricks.

Summary and conclusions

  • The authors have argued that automatic perceptual and cognitive mechanisms governing how they experience and reason about hidden things – in particular those underlying the well-known phenomenon of amodal presence and the less well-known, but presumably intimately related phenomenon of amodal absence –play a central role in many magic tricks.
  • The authors have also argued the causal role of these mechanisms, which cannot be observed directly, is difficult to appreciate even for experienced magicians, and that it may therefore have been largely neglected in discussions of how magic works.
  • The authors have also suggested that the surprising discrepancy between the expected and the actual efficiency of many magical routines may serve as a tell-tale sign of interesting psychological effects that may help guide further research into the psychology of magic.

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$)!)$!!$)+2))*)!*
!3!#4+!$!$!$
)!#%!'#)!$)
)*))**+5#$#)$
!$!!!$)!)!!
%&6789:67;9&$<=(8879>!&=)=
(8879=&$(8?9@+(8?')!!#
!!!)!!!!)#)
!$))!!+
@#$*!)!!!#$
%,)(88+6')$!#)
$!$!$))!!!
)%>(889&$@(8)
*)))!'+=!!)
%=AB=066C9#66C9=(88?')
.$)!!#$!*!)!!!$
)!$)!!!)!$
!+!)%>!=!667'*
Page 3 of 44 Perspectives on Psychological Science
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For Review Only
D
!!$$!#E$
E$!)#)+<$
!*!$)$)!$)$!$!!#!!
)$!)$
%#(88('+@#$***!#)*
*!#+
@!!!$!$#$!#)!
)$!!!%&$+(8D'+2$!#!
!)*$))$#$.$
$)*##)+F!
)&$@F))0%(887'*$!!$
$*!!$#)!)
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!!!)!!#!*+!)!!)
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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that subjective inflation should be interpreted as an intra-perceptual phenomenon and not a post-Perceptual phenomenological phenomenon, and they argue that there is sufficient evidence to tip the scales toward intra-ceptual interpretations of visibility and confidence judgments.
Abstract: In a recent opinion piece, Abid (2019) criticizes the hypothesis that subjective inflation may partly account for apparent phenomenological richness across the visual field and outside the focus of attention. In response, we address three main issues. First, we maintain that inflation should be interpreted as an intraperceptual-and not post-perceptual-phenomenon. Second, we describe how inflation may differ from filling-in. Finally, we contend that, in general, there is sufficient evidence to tip the scales toward intraperceptual interpretations of visibility and confidence judgments.

3 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is argued that an intriguing form of amodal completion, dealing with spontaneous interpretations of the inside of objects is the key to understanding why people find it difficult to see how the impossible dovetail is indeed possible.
Abstract: Here, we consider a well-known wooden puzzle known as the impossible dovetail. We argue that an intriguing form of amodal completion, dealing with spontaneous interpretations of the inside of objects is the key to understanding why people find it difficult to see how the impossible dovetail is indeed possible.

3 citations


Cites background from "The Other Side of Magic."

  • ...In this illusion, which is regularly employed by magicians (Ekroll et al., 2017), people tend to experience the knife as penetrating the arm, rather than the other way around (which is actually the case)....

    [...]

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2019
TL;DR: The figure-ground principles that underlie the organization of sensations in each sense individually are the same ones when sensations occur together in two or more modalities, as found in spatial or temporal ventriloquism, depending on the degree of correspondence between the sensation in each modality versus the strength of organization within each as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Two-dimensional visual, auditory and tactual sensations are perceived in three-dimensions. Visual and tactual surfaces become objects occluding one another, and intermixed sounds become segregated into discrete sources. For camouflage to be effective, it must counteract the figure-ground organization that makes prey visible by masking their edges and textures. The grouping and figure-ground principles that underlie the organization of sensations in each sense individually are the same ones when sensations occur together in two or more modalities. The effect of one modality on another, as found in spatial or temporal ventriloquism, depends on the degree of correspondence between the sensations in each modality versus the strength of organization within each. Handel suggests figure-ground organization seems based on innate core principles modified by experience.

2 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an account of magic within the theory of Bayesian predictive coding and present the "wow" effect of magic as an increase in surprise evoked by the prediction error between expected and observed data, taking into account prior knowledge of the observer, attention, and misdirection of perception and beliefs by the magician to bias the observer's predictions.

2 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Oct 2020-Heliyon
TL;DR: This work is, to the authors' knowledge, the first scientific study of the memorability of magic tricks and illustrates the power of naturalistic stimuli to study long-term memory while interrogating the interaction between short-term and long- term mechanisms.

2 citations


Additional excerpts

  • ...Magic tricks have been used in neuroscience to explore attention (Kuhn and Teszka, 2015); perception (Ekroll et al., 2017) or decision-making (Shalom et al....

    [...]

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Recognition-by-components (RBC) provides a principled account of the heretofore undecided relation between the classic principles of perceptual organization and pattern recognition.
Abstract: The perceptual recognition of objects is conceptualized to be a process in which the image of the input is segmented at regions of deep concavity into an arrangement of simple geometric components, such as blocks, cylinders, wedges, and cones. The fundamental assumption of the proposed theory, recognition-by-components (RBC), is that a modest set of generalized-cone components, called geons (N £ 36), can be derived from contrasts of five readily detectable properties of edges in a two-dimensiona l image: curvature, collinearity, symmetry, parallelism, and cotermination. The detection of these properties is generally invariant over viewing position an$ image quality and consequently allows robust object perception when the image is projected from a novel viewpoint or is degraded. RBC thus provides a principled account of the heretofore undecided relation between the classic principles of perceptual organization and pattern recognition: The constraints toward regularization (Pragnanz) characterize not the complete object but the object's components. Representational power derives from an allowance of free combinations of the geons. A Principle of Componential Recovery can account for the major phenomena of object recognition: If an arrangement of two or three geons can be recovered from the input, objects can be quickly recognized even when they are occluded, novel, rotated in depth, or extensively degraded. The results from experiments on the perception of briefly presented pictures by human observers provide empirical support for the theory. Any single object can project an infinity of image configurations to the retina. The orientation of the object to the viewer can vary continuously, each giving rise to a different two-dimensional projection. The object can be occluded by other objects or texture fields, as when viewed behind foliage. The object need not be presented as a full-colored textured image but instead can be a simplified line drawing. Moreover, the object can even be missing some of its parts or be a novel exemplar of its particular category. But it is only with rare exceptions that an image fails to be rapidly and readily classified, either as an instance of a familiar object category or as an instance that cannot be so classified (itself a form of classification).

5,464 citations


"The Other Side of Magic." refers background in this paper

  • ...Thus, on the basis of the well-known idea that the perceptual system tends to avoid interpretations involving unlikely coincidences (Biederman, 1987; Freeman, 1994; Rock, 1983) we may speculate that amodal absence does not involve the perceptual exclusion of all possible objects but only those that are deemed to be particularly unlikely on the basis of cues such as their size and shape relative to the occluder....

    [...]

  • ...The basic idea is that the perceptual system tends to avoid interpretations of the visual input that involve unlikely coincidences and alignments along the line of sight (Biederman, 1987; Freeman, 1994)....

    [...]

  • ...Thus, on the basis of the well-known idea that the perceptual system tends to avoid interpretations involving unlikely coincidences (Biederman, 1987; Freeman, 1994; Rock, 1983) we may speculate that amodal absence does not involve the perceptual exclusion of all possible objects but only those that…...

    [...]

Book
01 Jan 1935
TL;DR: Routledge is now reissuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965, including works by key figures such as C.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such asC.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set. A brochure listing each title in the "International Library of Psychology" series is available upon request.

4,169 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors showed that when brief blank fields are placed between alternating displays of an original and a modified scene, a striking failure of perception is induced and identification of changes becomes extremely difficult, even when changes are large and made repeatedly.
Abstract: When looking at a scene, observers feel that they see its entire structure in great detail and can immediately notice any changes in it However, when brief blank fields are placed between alternating displays of an original and a modified scene, a striking failure of perception is induced Identification of changes becomes extremely difficult, even when changes are large and made repeatedly Identification is much faster when a verbal cue is provided showing that poor visibility is not the cause of this difficulty Identification is also faster for objects considered to be important in the scene These results support the idea that observers never form a complete, detailed representation of their surroundings In addition, the results indicate that attention is required to perceive change, and that in the absence of localized motion signals attention is guided on the basis of high-level interest

2,226 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1923

1,905 citations


"The Other Side of Magic." refers background in this paper

  • ...Panels (a) and (b) of Figure 2 illustrate the well-known Gestalt principle of good continuation (Wertheimer, 1923/2012)....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The legitimate and the erroneous inferences that have been drawn from change blindness research are discussed, and a set of requirements to help separate them are offered.

1,001 citations


"The Other Side of Magic." refers background in this paper

  • ...Researchers on change blindness (Rensink, O’Regan, & Clark, 1997; Simons & Levin, 1997; Simons & Rensink, 2005) have shown that quite dramatic changes in a visual scene, which are readily noticeable if they occur in isolation, are extremely difficult to detect if they are accompanied by synchronous…...

    [...]