3/21/2023 0 Comments Scientific magic trick![]() ![]() ![]() Slydini’s technique is superb, but the illusion would not work without a critical element: our visual system’s inability to assign two meanings to the same action. In this trick, Slydini makes several paper balls disappear, only to reveal at the end of the performance that they are inside of a hat that was shown to be previously empty. Master magician Tony Slydini’s paperballs-to-hat magic trick is a case example. Close-up rope tricks and grand stage illusions such as cutting the woman in half depend on the audience segregating figure from ground in specific and contrived ways that do not match reality.Ī paper by Van de Cruys, Wagemans and Ekroll, just published in i-Perception, applies this idea of perceptual ambiguity to the exploitation of equivocal hand motions by magicians. Scientist and magician Anthony Barnhart proposed that many magic tricks rely on perceptual Gestalt principles–like accidental alignments and good continuations. Spectators tend to prefer the two-long-ropes interpretation, which is statistically more likely in normal circumstances.Īmbiguous images–like where people see either a vase or two faces in the same picture–show that information arriving to our visual system is not clear-cut, and can be interpreted in many ways. Magicians have really learned to exploit this." As have dog owners.The magician's hand partially occludes (left) either two long ropes (middle) or one long rope and one short rope (right). "We feel that we're aware of everything that's going on around us, but we actually perceive what we expect. "It happens much more than we think," he says. To Kuhn, the result illustrates how expectations can trump raw visual inputs. "You can still attend to the sleeve without looking at it directly," he explains. And eye tracking is not the best way to monitor attention, he says. Even when done correctly the trick only fooled 19 of 38 test subjects, which makes interpreting the results potentially more complicated, he points out. The experiment had some shortcomings, however, cautions cognitive neuroscientist Amir Raz of the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute in Canada, who also studies magic tricks. ![]() The researchers tracked the gazes of those viewing the videos: during the first two throws viewers' eyes followed the ball to the top of the screen, whereas on the fake throw their eyes were fixated primarily on Kuhn's face. Participants' eyes, in contrast, apparently were not fooled. ![]() His gaze was crucial in causing the illusion because it cued the expectations of the watchers, he says. "That tells us it's due to expectations," Kuhn explains. Participants were nearly twice as likely to experience the illusion when Kuhn looked up on the last throw than when he looked at his hand. In both cases, some people who saw the video claimed they perceived the ball flying off the top of the screen after the fake throw, based on their answers to a questionnaire, the researchers report in the November 21 Current Biology. To study the source of its power, Kuhn and his colleague Michael Land of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, videotaped Kuhn doing the trick in two ways: on the final fake throw, he would either look up where the ball should have flown or he would look down at his hand. I knew that it was quite powerful," Kuhn says. "It's one of these standard tricks in magic. "People claim they're looking at the ball but really they're making use of social cues," says a co-author of the report, psychologist and magician Gustav Kuhn of the University of Durham in England.Ī magician performing the trick tosses a ball in the air twice and then pantomimes a third throw. Researchers report that the illusion, which they found could be rather convincing, results simply from watching the magician's face and not from glancing where the palmed ball would have traveled. Like tricking a dog into chasing a stick that is not thrown, a stage magician can create the illusion she has tossed a ball into the air when actually she has palmed it. ![]()
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