Magicians use misdirection to prevent you from realizing the methods used to create a magical effect, thereby allowing you to experience an apparently impossible event. Magicians have acquired much knowledge about misdirection, and have suggested several taxonomies of misdirection. These describe many of the fundamental principles in misdirection, focusing on how misdirection is achieved by magicians. In this article we review the strengths and weaknesses of past taxonomies, and argue that a more natural way of making sense of misdirection is to focus on the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved. Our psychologically-based taxonomy has three basic categories, corresponding to the types of psychological mechanisms affected: perception, memory, and reasoning. Each of these categories is then divided into subcategories based on the mechanisms that control these effects. This new taxonomy can help organize magicians' knowledge of misdirection in a meaningful way, and facilitate the dialog between magicians and scientists.

We present results from two experiments, in which subjects watched continuous videos of a professional magician repeatedly performing a maneuver in which a ball could “magically” appear under a cup. In all cases, subjects were asked to predict whether the ball would appear under the cup or not, while scalp EEG recordings were performed. Both experiments elicited strong and consistent behavioral and neural responses. In the first experiment, we used two blocks of videos with different probabilities of the ball appearing in the cup and found that, first, based on the behavioral responses, the subjects could track this probability change; and second, the different probabilities modulated the neural responses. In the second experiment, we introduced a control condition in which the magician performed the maneuver under the table, out of subjects' view. Comparing the two conditions (i.e., performing the maneuver within or out of the subjects' view), we found that, first, the magic trick dramatically biased the subjects' behavioral responses; and second, the two conditions led to differential neural responses, in spite of the fact that the stimulus triggering the evoked responses (seeing the ball in the cup) was exactly the same. Altogether, our results show how new insights into sensory and cognitive processing can be obtained using adapted magic tricks. Moreover, the approach of analyzing responses to continuous video presentations offers a more ecological setting compared to classic evoked potential paradigms, which are typically based on presenting static images flashed at the center of the screen.