Social Misdirection Fails to Enhance a Magic Illusion

Abstract

Visual, multisensory and cognitive illusions in magic performances provide new windows into the psychological and neural principles of perception, attention, and cognition. We investigated a magic effect consisting of a coin “vanish” (i.e., the perceptual disappearance of a coin after a simulated toss from hand to hand). Previous research has shown that magicians can use joint attention cues such as their own gaze direction to strengthen the observers’ perception of magic. Here we presented naïve observers with videos including real and simulated coin tosses to determine if joint attention might enhance the illusory perception of simulated coin tosses. The observers’ eye positions were measured, and their perceptual responses simultaneously recorded via button press. To control for the magician’s use of joint attention cues, we occluded his head in half of the trials. We found that subjects did not direct their gaze at the magician’s face at the time of the coin toss, whether the face was visible or occluded, and that the presence of the magician’s face did not enhance the illusion. Thus, our results show that joint attention is not necessary for the perception of this effect. We conclude that social misdirection is redundant and possibly detracting to this very robust sleight-of-hand illusion. We further determined that subjects required multiple trials to effectively distinguish real from simulated tosses; thus the illusion was resilient to repeated viewing.

Choosing in Freedom or Forced to Choose? Introspective Blindness to Psychological Forcing in Stage-Magic

“…Although attempts to establish a relationship between magic and psychology are not new [11], [38], [39], recently there has been a renewed interest in using magic techniques as a vehicle to investigate more systematically the human brain and behaviour [1], [2], [9], [40]. These studies have addressed several aspects of perception including eye-movements [41], [42], [43], [44] attention [7], [45], [46], [47], visual system limits [8], self-deception [29], [30], and brain-processing of causal effects [48].…”

“…As with similar recent enterprises which have linked magic tradition to neuroscience [7], [8], [9], [10] and psychology [11], here we progressively drift from street magic to the laboratory. First, we conducted a one-on-one stage-magic performance, where the magician follows a script designed to inquire participants about their subjective feeling of choosing freely or forced.…”

The ball vanishes in the air: can we blame representational momentum?

“…In the Bdivided attention^hypothesis, we assume that the Bmagician's hand^distractor is more likely responsible for the partial attentional capture than other distractors, such as the magician's social cues (magician gaze and head direction). Indeed, according to several authors (Cui et al, 2011;OteroMillan et al, 2011;Riero, Martinez-Conde & Macknik, 2013), magicians' hand motions could attract spectators' attention much more strongly than his gaze or head directions.…”

The Applied Cognitive Psychology of Attention: A Step Closer to Understanding Magic Tricks

“…Hence, the routine was bare of elements such as eye contact, body language, voice, and a demonstration that the magician is using an ungimmicked pen-features that magicians usually use to enhance the effect (Lamont & Wiseman, 2005). Recent research findings suggest, however, that such social cues-often presumed to operationalize critical aspects of magic-may be less important than heretofore acknowledged (Cui, Otero-Millan, Macknik, King, & Martinez-Conde, 2011).…”