Occultism & Popular Culture Conference Presentation

 
 

Genuine Fake Mind Reading

Using Mentalism Magic Methods to Explore Perceptions and Misperceptions of AI and Neurotechnology 

Lecture Notes & Further Reading:

  • Slate Writing Music

    • matt-tompkins.com/music [Just the chorus of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven playing in reverse]

(Devil image is a detail from the Codex Gigas)

Attentional Blindness

  • Neisser, U. (1979). The control of information pickup in selective looking. In Perception and its Development: A Tribute to Eleanor J.Gibson (pp. 201-219). London: Psychology Press.

  • Rensink, R. A., O'Regan, J. K., & Clark, J. J. (1997). To see or not to see: The need for attention to perceive changes in scenes. Psychological science, 8(5), 368-373.

  • Rensink, R. A. (2018). To have seen or not to have seen: a look at Rensink, O’Regan, and Clark (1997). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(2), 230-235.

  • Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28(9), 1059-1074.

  • Simons, D., & Chabris, C. F. (2010). The invisible gorilla: And other ways our intuitions deceive us. New York: Crown.

  • Simons, D. J. (2010). Monkeying around with the gorillas in our midst: familiarity with an inattentional-blindness task does not improve the detection of unexpected events. i-Perception, 1(1), 3-6.

  • Reconstructive Memory

    • Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 13(5), 585-589.

    • Loftus, E. F. (2003). Make-believe memories. American Psychologist, 58(11), 867.

Additional Resources:

Simulating Future Technologies with the Science of Magic

(The following article was originally published in Swedish in the Summer 2023 edition of Forskning & Framsteg magazine)

Magic and science might seem like an unlikely pairing, but scientific interest in magic illusions can actually be traced back to the earliest days of experimental psychology, when natural scientists sought to investigate claims about apparently miraculous spiritual phenomena. In fact, the earliest studies of magic involved researchers empirically demonstrating that healthy honest observers could be fooled into mistaking illusions for ‘genuine’ supernatural phenomena.  Today, the so-called ‘Science of Magic’ has arguably been undergoing a renaissance, with researchers around the world increasingly using tools developed for magic performances to study human (and in some cases animal) cognition. Magic trick methods have been demonstrably effective tools for overtly and covertly manipulating participants’ experiences in laboratory settings.  I myself have used it to build and use fake mind-reading machines together with colleagues at McGill University in Canada. I have an education in experimental psychology and neuroscience, but have also worked for many years as a semi-professional magician .

 

Pick a card!

One the best things about researching magic is it lends itself excellently to practical demonstrations! Take a look at the above image of 6 different play cards. Select any card, and concentrate on your selection. Try and picture your card’s image as vividly as possible in your mind. It might help to close your eyes for a moment. Believe it or not, I’m going to eliminate the card that you are thinking of. Scroll to the bottom of this article and, you will see below that there are now only five cards left, and your card is gone! I’ve apparently read your mind and removed the card that you were merely thinking of! 

Beyond illustrating how magic tricks can exploit counterintuitive psychological principles to induce seemingly ‘impossible experiences’, this trick can also exemplify how differences in framing and presentation can create diverse illusory experiences. The original version trick involved physical cards, and it could be presented as a feat of dexterity. The performer might falsely claim to have snatched the target card with speed that was ‘quicker than the eye.’

But the trick can also be presented as an act of mind reading or even mind influencing. Perhaps the magician divined your thought-of-card by sensing your unspoken thoughts. Or maybe the magician manipulated your free will and influenced you to select the card of their choice?

 

Failing to See (and failing to think that we cannot see)

This particular trick has even been used by contemporary psychiatrists as a quick and reliable way of inducing a non-distressing anomalous experience of ‘thought interference’ in both clinical and non-clinical populations. Of course, nothing ‘magical’ actually occurred. This trick operates on a principle that psychologists now call ‘change blindness.’ Change blindness occurs when people fail to detect changes in visual scenes when these changes are accompanied by a visual disruption. In this case, I’m able to remove the card that you were ‘merely thinking of’ because I actually remove all the cards! This can feel magical because most of us don’t believe that they could possibly fail to notice such a dramatic switch. Magicians had been using this principle to perform tricks since at least the early 1900’s.  The basic idea behind this trick was developed and by a magician named E.A. Parsons, who performed under the name Henry Hardin (1849- 1929). It’s worth noting that change blindness was only formally recognized by the scientific community in the 1990’s, when a team of researchers led by Ron Rensink developed a simple visual paradigm to demonstrate that healthy observers have a great deal of difficulty identifying sometimes dramatic changes to photographs. Ironically, the Rensink and his team struggled to publish their findings because other visual scientists who peer-reviewed their work initially believed that it was impossible that viewers would take so long to detect the changes!

Change Blindness Demo: This gif an approximation of the stimulus images from used in Rensink, O'regan, & Clark's (1997) ‘Flicker Paradigm’ . There are actually three images- a photo, a black screen, and modified photo. How many differences can you detect between the two photos?

 

Magical Seeming Innovations

Today, change blindness is an established field of research. In combination with a bit of sleight-of-hand tricks, it has actually led to the discovery of so-called choice blindness , and to the founding of the research team where I’m currently employed. When new technological innovations emerge, it people perceive them as almost magical. Historical examples include wireless telegraphy and television. At the moment, artificial intelligence has taken on a similar role.  The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once noted that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The premise of our research is that the reverse can also be true: Magic tricks and illusions can be made to be indistinguishable from advanced technology.

Partially thanks to recent developments in AI and machine learning, genuine neurotechnology is advancing at rapid pace. Machines are becoming increasingly capable of decoding human brain activity. While impressive, such procedures remain relatively limited: Information decoded from brain activity is often rudimentary and requires cooperation from participants. Furthermore, the designing and operating such machines still requires highly expensive equipment and a high level of scientific expertise. But nonetheless, brain reading technology has the potential to not only become more powerful, but also more commonplace. Many reasonable people agree that we should start taking steps to prepare for this potential future, and it would be ideal to if we could anticipate how people will react to such developments. But this presents a problem. We’d be asking people imagine their own future reactions to speculative, currently science-fictional, technology. Past psychological research has demonstrated that can people struggle to predict even their own feelings and behavioral response to future events.

 

Using Mentalism Magic to Simulate Neurotechnology

The fake set-up at McGill University that utilised a dummy fMRI scanner to help create the illusion of advanced neuroscientific technology (Photo by Madalina Prostean)

Myself and my colleagues in the Choice Blindness Lab, along with our collaborators at McGill University, have developed a novel solution to this methodological problem: We’ve created an experimental paradigm where we use magic illusions to trick participants into thinking that they are interacting with real technology. To ‘prove’ the machines are effective, we borrowed methods from a particular branch of performance magic known as ‘mentalism.’ Mentalism is a genre of magic that involves creating the appearance of psychic or supernormal powers, like reading someone’s mind or predicting the future.

Such methods have traditionally been used for entertainment purposes by magicians who openly acknowledge that they are using trickery. Historically, they have also been used to by fraudulent mystics looking to create the impression that they have genuine supernatural abilities.

Participants sign up to our studies believing that they are taking part in research involving cutting edge experimental neurotechnological systems. We always reveal the illusory nature of the machines to the participants. But we don’t tell them until after the experiment has concluded. So even though the technology itself is illusory, when participants believe that it’s real, we can then effectively measure and record genuine behavioral responses. Paradoxically, we need to deceive our participants to ensure that we receive honest responses.  

We recently published a paper describing how we led 59 participants to believe that (fake) neurotechnological machines could infer their unspoken personal preferences even and detect their deep-seated attitudes. Participants in our experiments were generally very accepting of our illusory machines- no one expressed any overt suspicion about the veracity of the machines nor the ‘evidence’ of their efficacy. We had participants complete traditional paper/pencil style surveys about their attitudes, and we then compared these survey responses with supposed outputs produced by our mind reading machines. Throughout the experiment, we used various magic trick methods to secretly peek at participants’ written responses so that we could manually adjust our ‘outputs’ match them at other times we would use slight-of-hand sneakily write the outputs after participants had explicitly revealed them. For the participants, this created a compelling illusion that our technology was able to ‘read their brains’ with uncanny precision.

A simulated version of our simulated set-up at Lund University, the EEG cap plugs into nothing and the apparent ‘biometric facial analysis’ that participants saw is actually a Snap filter (Photo by Peter Westrup)

Genuine reactions to fake results

In a way, ‘performing’ the tricks under such conditions was actually easier than doing so in the context of a magic show. When people go to see a show, they know that a magician is going to be try to misdirect them, but our participants initially had no reason to suspect that we were using trickery. And because we were cheating, we were always able to make it seem as if the machine’s outputs corresponded with participants’ attitudes.

At points of the procedure, we deliberately presented participants with readings that we knew contradicted their survey responses. This is perhaps one of the more fascinating aspects of the study: When confronted with fictional outputs from the fake machines that contradicted their own stated preferences, most participants accepted that the machine was more accurate at determining their attitudes then they were! One participant rationalized that the machine had accurately detected what they felt “in [their] heart.” In effect, our participants seemed to be willing defer to a sham neurological measurement even when it directly contradicted their own introspection. Overall, I consider this experiment to be a promising proof of concept for our method of convincingly simulating advanced technologies using magic methods. We’re now running a series of follow-up experiments to further explore the paradigm’s potential.

I hope the insights gleaned from our methods can help stimulate discussion about the impacts emerging technologies. Allowing people to experience the effects of technology can provide valuable information about people’s reactions to prospective technologies before such technologies are feasible may be of use to ethicists and policy makers who are grappling with the potential societal implications. And we’re also planning on more closely exploring psychological the mechanisms that lead participants to believe our deceptions. This knowledge could help us develop new tools to promote better critical thinking and healthy skepticism.

Haunted Histories and the Science of Magic

Richard Hodgson & ‘Friend’- An example of a fraudulent spirit photograph featured in Hereward Carrington’s (1930) The Story of Psychic Science

While I’m excited about the future directions of our paradigm, I’m also immensely pleased with the way our study fits into the history of the magic and psychology. The idea of using discretely magic methods to simulate extraordinary experiences arguably dates back to one of the first ever empirical studies of magic. The study in question, titled, ‘The possibilities of mal-observation and lapse of memory from a practical point of view’, was originally published in 1887 in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. It wasn’t conducted by experimental psychologists, but rather by a pair of ‘psychical’ researchers: Richard Hodgson and S.J. Davey. They were investigating the reliability of eyewitness testimony as it related to alleged paranormal phenomena. Specifically, they were interested in the reports of seances that were being conducted by contemporary spiritualist mediums. Proponents of spiritualism, who included eminent scientists such as William Crookes, Oliver Lodge, and even Alfred Russell Wallace (who co-developed the theory of natural selection along with Charles Darwin) argued that witness testimonies of miraculous seeming events should be considered powerful evidence in favor of the genuineness of mediums. For example, one of the popular séance phenomeon at the time was ‘spirit slate writing.’ Mediums would use small chalkboards that were common in school classrooms at the time, and written messages would seem to appear on on the boards even when it seemed that no living person could have possibly produced the writing. On the other hand, skeptics argued that witnesses might be being deceived by elaborate illusions and tricks that were akin to methods used by performing magicians.

To empirically investigate this question, Hodgson and Davey conducted a series of hoax seances using magic trick methods. Participants in the study were invited to spend an evening with a ‘medium,’ Davey, and observe his abilities. Davey used slight-of-hand techniques and misdirection to secretly write on the slates himself (or to sneakily swap blank slates for pre-written ones), and then pretended that the writing had come from spirits. [PS4]  The participants weren’t explicitly told that they were seeing a genuine display of mediumship, nor were they informed that they were seeing a magic show. Unlike most professional mediumistic demonstrations or magic shows, participants weren’t financially charged. However, their ‘price of admission’ was that they were asked to write letters to Hodgson detailing the events of the evening in as much detail as they could remember. Hodgson and Davey collected 27 distinct accounts from 17 separate performances. Because the ‘séance’ was scripted and choreographed, the researchers were able to directly assess the accuracy of the witness statements compared to actual events.

The results were dramatic and controversial. Hodgson and Davey wrote that witnesses failed to notice (or remember) critical aspects of the performances. For example, many witnesses forgot or failed to notice moments when Davey himself was handling the slates- they testified that the slates had never left their sight, when, in reality, Davey had not only held them, but had managed to substitute entirely different ones.  So even if someone knew how the tricks were accomplished, there was no way to reconstruct the genuine methods based on the witness testimonies- the stories that participants told were genuniely impossible. Furthermore, many participants also confidently reported seeing events that never actually happened. Some participants’ testified that they had specifically examined the slates themselves and even cleaned them to ensure that they were blank, when in actual fact they had not been allowed to touch the slates, which weren’t blank, and had writing on them all along. One participant was amazed that the spirits had somehow ‘known’ his secret childhood nickname “Boorzu” when he’d actually been presented with the sloppily written word “book.” The results demonstrated that magic methods lead cause healthy honest observers to genuinely experience extraordinary phenomena, even when these phenomena are produced by trickery.  

Not only did this experiment represent a revolutionary way of integrating magic methods into a study of perception and memory, but the results have been borne out by subsequent cognitive psychology experiments into phenomena like inattentional blindness and reconstructive memory.

In developing our fake mind reading machines, we used magic methods that were directly derived from the methods used by Davey to fraudulently produce ‘spirit writing.’ Today, we’re effectively operating as mediums. Except, instead attributing our powers to spiritual entities, we pretend our powers are derived from a fictional neurotechnological system. The exact same magic trick methods that deceived Victorian-era observers are, with the proper framing, just as viable today.  

I don’t think this necessarily means that people are gullible or unobservant. Rather, it illustrates that our minds are often much weirder than we imagine them to be. This discrepancy between how people think their minds work and how they actually work can be exploited for entertainment, for fraud, or for empirically exploring the behavioral impacts of speculative technology. 



Forskar Grand Prix- Seeing Through Illusions

In December 2022, I traveled to Stockholm to represent Lund University in the national finals of Forskar Grand Prix. It was a privilege to be part of the contest alongside excellent researchers, and I was immensely pleased to be awarded the 1st place prize. Some folks have pointed out that using magic tricks to solicit the audience vote is somewhat akin to ‘cheating,’ which, as someone with a deep love of deception and rigged games, I embrace as compliment!

One of the biggest challenges of the format was to compress a research topic down into a four minute presentation. Personally, I think this is, in some ways, impossible. At best, there’s enough time to sketch some basic ideas and to hopefully spark enough curiosity that the audience is motivated to seek out more information. With that in mind, if you enjoyed the talk (which you can watch via the video below), and you’re interested in learning a bit more about this kind of work, you’ve come to the write place. This page is written to serve as a peak behind the curtain into some of the ideas and research that inspired my presentation.

(If you haven’t seen the talk yet, I highly recommend you give it watch before reading further.

It’s only 4 minutes, and the subsequent text contains spoilers!)


Talk Title: Let’s start with the title, ‘Seeing through illusions’ is derived directly from a book of the same name written by the psychologist Richard L. Gregory (2009). This is a delightful title because of its ambiguous DuckRabbit-esque meanings: On one hand, it can be read as referring to understanding the underlying reality beneath the deceptive surface of our subjective experiences. On the other hand, it alludes to idea that a great deal of our perceptual experience (if not all of it) is fundamentally illusory! Even when we’re experiencing ‘true’ perceptions of the world around us, those experiences are effectively constructions of our minds. Seeing Through Illusions is presently out of print, but used copies are still readily available, and I can highly recommend it. Gregory manages to cover a great deal of cross-disciplinary ground, ranging from philosophy, to psychology, to physiology, all while retaining an engaging and comfortably accessible style.

Taking Pictures: When I bring up my next slide, I ask the audience to take out their phones and snap a picture of the stage. I explain that most people believe that memory works like a camera or a recorder. This idea comes from survey research conducted by psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris (2011; 2012). They surveyed people over the phone and online and found that there are significant discrepancies between what people believe about memory and perception, and how memory and perception actually work. Your memory does NOT work like a video camera, although sometimes it can feel as though it does. Beyond that point, I do have an ulterior motive: Later, I reveal that I (hopefully undetectably) changed shirts midway through my talk. I ask people to take a picture ‘of the stage’ so they have a visual record of my original shirt, all without me having to specifically instruct folks to attend to my clothing. True story: When I first performed that T-shirt trick on stage was at an academic conference, I’d been worried the change would be too obvious, but I ran into the opposite problem. In a room full of around 80 researchers, not only did nobody notice, but most refused believe me when I claimed that my shirt had changed! It was only because someone had happened to take a picture of me at the start of the talk that I was able convince the audience that a change even happened. So, ever since, I script that photo taking moment into the procedure.

Text and ‘Triangles’: But let’s talk about the figure itself: The image combines a pair of ‘classic’ illusions: I’ve taken a Kanizsa Triangle (Kanizsa, 1976) and embedded a written phrase into it that’s designed to evoke a proof reading illusion (e.g. Pillsbury, 1897; Sloboda, 1978). I first saw this arrangement of text in a cognitive psychology text book (Eysnyk & Keene, 2005), where it was presented as an unreferenced demo of ‘top-down’ processing. The original version reads: “Paris in the the spring,” but I like to sub in the names of the places where I’m working or speaking. Top down processing, in this case, refers our various mental preconceptions- e.g., memories, beliefs, expectations, etc. Such processes can be contrasted with with ‘bottom-up’ information from our senses- e.g. light hitting our retinas that is transduced into brain activity. Our perceptual experiences (and by extension our memories) result from a synthesis of top down and bottom up processes. The punchline here is that perceptions are not simply not simply bottom up reflections of the outside world; they’re influenced by a variety of top down mental factors. In this instance, people expect the phrase to read “Lund in the Spring,” and as a consequence they fail to notice the extra “the.” As I mention in the talk, this is fun because the extra word is not physically difficult to detect- the word is clearly printed and visible for several seconds. But, when the illusion works, top down factors are effectively overriding the the bottom up information (that typo was actually unintentional, but I’m leaving it). Such ‘proof reading errors’ present a nice practical example of top down processes in action. They’re particularly pernicious, when we’re composing our own text; we know (top down) what it is we intend to say, and this can make it very hard to detect errors in our own writing. One reason why copy-editors can be so invaluable is because they’re able to assess text with fewer preconceptions than its author. In a pinch, you can also boost your own detection rates by taking a break before proof reading your writing—‘future you’ is sort of a different person—or by forcing yourself to read your work out-loud—you can somewhat hack yourself by switching-up sensory modalities. Somewhat frustratingly, I don’t have a proper reference for the real origin of the “Paris in the the Spring” illusion- So if anyone knows of a proper original source please do get in touch!

Those illusory ‘triangles,’ in contrast, are very well documented in scientific literature. They’re an example of a Kanizsa figure, named for the Italian psychologist and artist Gaetano Kanizsa. That particular image first appeared in an article written by Kanizsa that was published in an Italian psychology journal in 1955 (an English translation by Gerino was published in 1987). They were originally presented as a thought experiment to explore the role of past experiences on perceptions. It continues to be celebrated by vision scientists as concise example of the dissociation between perception and cognition (e.g. Firestone & Scholl, 2016): Even when we know that the there are no edges to the white triangle, we still see them. Such ‘illusory contours’ have been a staple of visual cognition experiments for decades. We now know, for example, that they can even activate similar neural pathways as genuine lines (e.g. Maertens & Pollmann, 2005). For my purposes, the triangles represent a reverse form of the illusion inducing top down style processing evidenced by the “the the spring” text. Taken together, these simple illusions show how easy it is healthy sober adults to fail to perceive seemingly obvious sights or even to hallucinate images that don’t really exist. The aforementioned fact that many people believe their memories work like a video camera shows that such illusions can be deeply counter intuitive. It’s not so easy to hear in the recording, but both of these simple demos illicit gasps and explicit expressions of surprise from the audience, as if I’ve just performed a magic trick. People are often shocked that they could have failed to detect the second ‘the’ or that the edges they vividly perceive in the triangles are not really printed on the page. Hence, my third point about metacognition. These feelings of incredulity can be conceptualized as resulting from people being confronted with their own metacognitive illusions. That is to say, they demonstrate how people’s self-evaluations of their own visual experiences diverge starkly from their actual visual experience. This concept is very similar to what magicians refer to as the ‘illusion of impossibility’ (e.g. Aronson, 1990; Kuhn, 2019).  

Some Practical Implications: In next slide, my aim was to use few more of my minutes explicitly argue that illusions have practical consequences beyond that simple figure (and to make a quick, probably imperceptible Arrested Development reference): Each of these four domains can (and have) filled numerous articles, books, and theses! So I’ll just take this opportunity to briefly highlight a few select bits of research.

Eye-witness testimony in courtroom settings is an excellent example of a context where illusions and metacognitive illusions can be important. One key finding from cognitive psychology is that our memories for events are ‘reconstructive’ (e.g. Loftus, 2003) that is to say, we don’t actually have the capacity to ‘instant replay’ our past experiences, even though sometimes it can feel like we can. We all know that we can forget things, but it’s not always intuitive to realize that healthy normal adults can also very easily form memories of events that never actually happened- such ‘phantom’ memories are fairly easy to induce in laboratory settings (and in the context of magic performances), which implies that they can also manifest themselves in people’s day-to-day lives. Personally, I’ve now got several well remembered incidents in my life that I now know never happened. So I know firsthand that this can be unsettling… My own feelings about the practical ramifications of eye witness testimony research have been heavily influenced by the work of Prof. Elizabeth Loftus, whose has spent decades experimentally exploring the (un)reliability of human memory and applying her expertise to real-world legal scenarios. She has a nice TED talk that provides a fairly solid introduction to her work on memory that’s viewable here. It’s also worth noting that the idea of adapting laboratory findings to legal contexts is a not at all a straightforward problem (see Otgaar, Howe, & Dodier, 2022 for a nice contemporary discussion of the complexities), but, nonetheless there’s definitely room for improvement when it comes to the way that court systems around the world apply (or fail to apply) the science of memory and perception.

Security: Understanding the differences between how perception feels like it works versus how it actually works is crucial for training security personnel to be properly vigilant for threats- to ensure they’re most likely to notice real problems and least likely to generate false alarms (e.g. Näsholm, Rohlfing, & Sauer, 2014; Muhl-Richardson et al., 2021).

Medical Screenings: Similar considerations can apply to hospital settings- for example, when radiologists need to search through scans they sometimes need to detect relatively small anomalies buried in complex visual scenes (e.g. Drew, Võ, & Wolfe, 2013).

Traffic Safety: Attention, awareness, and illusions can be very important to consider when you’re driving (super basic- don’t drive and text! Even when it feels like you’re able to do it, you’re almost certainly highly impaired). My colleague Vebjørn Ekroll recently published an excellent article where he and his co-authors compelling argue that understanding magic illusions can help us better understand traffic accidents (Ekroll et al., 2021).

This idea of magic and traffic safety nicely leads us into the closing argument of my talk. As both a researcher and a semi-professional magician, I’m a strong proponent of the ‘Science of Magic,’ an interdisciplinary endeavor wherein scholars and performers work collaboratively to better understand the principles underlying how people experience magic illusions (e.g. Lamont & Wiseman, 1999; Kuhn, Amlani, & Rensink, 2008; Macknik et al., 2008; Rensink & Kuhn, 2015; Kuhn, 2019; Tompkins, 2019). The relationship between magic and psychology can be traced back to very origins of psychology as scientific discipline- with several legendary founding fathers of psychology sought to use magic to explore the limits and eccentricities of human minds: Wilhelm Wundt (1879; Tompkins, 2017) attended seances that he publicly attributed to conjuring tricks, William James (1890) kept a Ouija board in his lab at Harvard for demonstrating the power of ideomotor illusions, Alfred Binet (1894; Thomas, Didierjean, & Nicolas, 2016) arranged for sleight-of-hand artists to have their tricks filmed in his laboratory. Despite some promising early work in the late 1800s, the concept of performance magic was largely ignored by scientists throughout the 20th century. But in these last couple decades, we’ve seen something like a Science of Magic Renaissance. Since the year 2000, there have been more than 100 new experimental papers published on the topic of magic illusions, compared to just 13 that had been published prior to 2000 (Tompkins, 2021). To be clear, this is still a relatively tiny sub-discipline; however, there is a growing appreciation amongst researchers that magic tricks can represent a powerful tool to help develop new ways of investigating human cognition. And there’s also a lovely growing community of academics and performers who are working in this area. As I mentioned at the end of my talk, my actual current job is design fake mind control machines that are designed help us study how people (mis)perceive emerging technology. If you’re interested, we recently published a paper on this topic in Consciousness and Cognition (Olson, et al. in press)- you can read the full paper here. Basically, the idea is that we can use magic illusions to simulate futuristic technologies that might be able to read people’s minds, predict their actions, or even influence their behaviors. Such technology doesn’t currently exist, but thanks to some old-school magic methods, we can make participants believe that it does. That way, we can measure our participants’ genuine behavioral responses to our fake science-fictional tech. The paradigm allows us to explore how people think (or fail to think) critically about emerging tech, and can also provide us with a sort of sneak preview as to how people might react to such tech if were to be developed. To be clear: We always ultimately reveal to people that machines are actually elaborate tricks. I look forward to sharing more of this ongoing project in the near-ish future! 

Final Reveals: And finally, a few words about my talk’s ending/final reveals: One of my favorite things about studying magic is that it lends itself so well to demonstrations! Rather than simply describing illusions, I can help the audience to experience the effects for themselves. By way of illustrating how illusions can be used in more dynamic natural seeming ways, I appear to pull a red ball out of the projected slide and then make it vanish from my hands. Next, I reveal that the glasses on my face contain no lenses- they’re just empty frames, and I note that I’m wearing a different t-shirt than the one that I had on at the beginning of the talk. The glasses and the t-shirt were intended to serve as more ‘real life’ parallels to the opening figure. The illusion of lens in the glasses frames relates to the imaginary triangles. While people’s failure to spot the t-shirt swap relates to failing to notice the extra ‘the.’ When it comes to magic effects, I won’t be revealing actual performing methods, out of respect for magicians’ general reticence about exposing secrets. However, there are a few interesting things I can still tell you:

Red Ball Vanish: My method of vanishing that red ball can be traced back to at least the turn of the 20th century- and it’s probably attributable to the magician named Professor Herwin. I’m a big fan of vanishes as a research tool- in fact, my first ever academic publication (Tompkins, Woods, & Aimola-Davies, 2016) describes an experiment that involved ‘vanishing’ non-existent objects.

Illusory Lenses: The glasses bit is something of a cheap gag- but only cost me. few seconds, and I think it nicely illustrates my earlier point about how expectations can cause us to ‘see’ things that aren’t really there. I first saw the lenseless glasses reveal in a talk delivered by the legendary magician and debunker James Randi, who delivered a guest lecture at an academic conference on the psychology of consciousness back in 2007.

T-shirt Change: And, that leaves us with the t-shirt switch, which seemed to leave a strong impression on the crowd. This ‘secret’ isn’t mine to give away, and I’m indebted to the trick’s creator for coming up with such a practical robust quick change. I will tell you when the change occurs. It happens at the moment I describe how the ‘triangles’ are really just V’s and pac men shapes. Interestingly, the underlying cognitive mechanism behind this illusion was probably different for people watching me live v. watching the steam or the recording. Prior to the live streaming, I had a word with the (lovely) tech crew, and they made sure to cut away from me for a second when I make the change. So, in the stream/recording, the effect is somewhat analogous to a continuity error in film. But for the live performance, the move actually happens in plain view of the entire audience, many of whom nonetheless fail to detect the change. That second t-shirt is actually a reference to the fictional Unseen University that features in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. One last fun fact to hopefully distract you a bit more from the actual mechanics: The concept of a quick change act has a long weird history in magic. For some performers, like the Italian magician/quick-change artist Leopoldo Frégoli (1867-1936), the main act of their shows consisted of rapidly and inexplicably transforming their outfits. Frégoli is particularly interesting in that he’s actually been immortalized in the field of psychiatry (e.g. Langdon, Connaughton, & Coltheart, 2014): ‘The Fregoli Delusion’ is a term for a relatively rare psychiatric disorder where patients maintain a delusional (often paranoid) belief that multiple different people in their lives are really the same person wearing different disguises.

‘Apology’/Clarification Towards the end of the event, all the presenters were given the opportunity to summarize their talks. Instead of recapping the content of my presentation, I instead opted issue a pseudo-apology for my deceptions. I sought to reassure viewers that being ‘fooled’ by the illusions that I demonstrated doesn’t happens because they are foolish. Most illusions and magic tricks are accomplished by exploiting otherwise adaptive cognitive processes. Tuning out distractions and selectively forgetting elements of our environment are key mechanisms that generally help us to interact with the world around us. These processes feel effortless- so it’s easy for us to mistakenly think that we’re all naturally experts in our own cognitive functioning. But our minds are weirder than we imagine them to be (see above re metacognition). This is a really important point to me. I think a big challenge in talking about illusions is that it can be easy one of two aspects of a false dichotomy. On one hand we seem to show that people are stupid/blind/bad at thinking OR, on the other hand, to present an overly flowery idea of human minds incredible miracle machines capable of the fantastic feats of perception and consciousness. Paradoxically, I feel that both of these perspectives are true and untrue. But that complexity can be really hard to convey fluenlty, especially within a tight four minute time slot.

Thanks very much for reading- I hope this behind the scenes look was as interesting as the talk itself! Please see below for some suggestions for further reading/watching along with a list of relevant references.

  • The Science of Magic Association (SoMA): scienceofmagicassoc.org

    • I’m one of the founding members of SoMA, an interdisciplinary organization designed to promote collaboration between academics and performers who are interested in rigorous research directed toward understanding the nature, function, and underlying mechanisms of magic. We regularly hold virtual and in-person events around the world.

    • You can check out some recordings of our past talks/events HERE and HERE

  • The Spectacle of Illusion: Magic the Paranormal and the Complicity of the Mind: matt-tompkins.com/soi

    • I wrote a book, aimed at general audiences, on the historical and contemporary relationships between magicians and psychologists

      • A selectively honest account of lies about the truth about lies- with lots of weird pictures!

    • You can check out a free sample HERE

  • Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic by Gustav Kuhn: mitpress.mit.edu/9780262039468/

    • My colleague and mentor Gustav Kuhn, has written what is probably the current definitive text on the contemporary science of magic scene. Highly recommended for anyone interested in learning more about the science of magic!

  • The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons: theinvisiblegorilla.com/

    • Simons and Chabris are the originators the iconic ‘Invisible Gorilla’ paradigm, which was, and continues to be a big influence on my own research. Their popular science book is not explicitly related to magic, per se, but is a fantastic overview of metacognitive illusions related to visual perception.

      • If you’re unfamiliar with the key study, HERE is a good place to start. It’s a bit more effective if you don’t have any gorilla related expectations (my apologies…) But even if you think you know what’s going to happen, I recommend watching this video to the end. And you can always get a vicarious kick out of showing it to other people who might be less familiar with the idea of inattentional blindness)

  • Choice Blindness Lab at Lund University: lucs.lu.se/research/choice-blindness-lab/home/

    • The concept of ‘choice blindness’ has always been one of my favorite examples of how magic methods can be used to advance psychological research, so it’s a real privilege to work here! (There aren’t really many institutions where I can get paid to develop fake mind control machines)

  • MAGIC Lab at Goldsmiths, University of London: magicresearchlab.com

    • I also maintain an affiliation with Gustav Kuhn’s Magic Lab at Goldsmiths University of London. Gustav (whose book I linked to above) is one of the pioneers of the contemporary science of magic movement, and he’s arguably the most prolific researcher in the field.

    • Actually one of my first job’s after obtaining my doctorate was to work as a fake psychic for Gustav, you can read about some of that work in this WIRED article

  • Richard Wiseman’s Quirkology Videos: youtube.com/@Quirkology/videos

 References:

  • Aronson, S. (1990). The Aronson Approach.

  • Binet, A. (1894). Psychology of prestidigitation. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (pp.555–571). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

  • Drew, T., Võ, M. L. H., & Wolfe, J. M. (2013). The invisible gorilla strikes again: Sustained inattentional blindness in expert observers. Psychological science, 24(9), 1848-1853.

  • Ekroll, V., Svalebjørg, M., Pirrone, A., Böhm, G., Jentschke, S., van Lier, R., Wagemans, J. & Høye, A. (2021). The illusion of absence: how a common feature of magic shows can explain a class of road accidents. Cognitive research: principles and implications, 6(1), 1-16.

  • Eysenck, Michael; Keane, Mark (2005). Cognitive Psychology: A Student's Handbook (5th ed.). Taylor & Francis. p. 2.

  • Firestone, C., & Scholl, B. J. (2016). Cognition does not affect perception: Evaluating the evidence for “top-down” effects. Behavioral and brain sciences, 39.

  • Gerbino, W. (2020). Perception and past experience 50 years after Kanizsa’s (Im) possible experiment. Perception, 49(3), 247-267.

  • Gregory, R. L. (2009). Seeing through illusions. Oxford University Press.

  • James W. (1890). Principles of Psychology. New York, NY

  • Kanizsa, G, (1955). Margini quasi-percettivi in campi con stimolazione omogenea. Rivista di Psicologia 49: 7-30.

  • Kanizsa, G. (1987). Quasi-perceptual margins in homogeneously stimulated fields (W. Gerbino, Trans.). In S. Petry & G. E. Meyer (Eds.), The perception of illusory contours (pp. 40–49). New York, NY: Springer. (Original work published 1955)

  • Kuhn, G. (2019). Experiencing the impossible: The science of magic. Mit Press.

  • Kuhn, G., Amlani, A. A., & Rensink, R. A. (2008). Towards a science of magic. Trends in cognitive sciences, 12(9), 349-354.

  • Lamont, P. (2010). The misdirected quest. Psychologist, 23(12), 978-980.

  • Langdon, R., Connaughton, E., & Coltheart, M. (2014). The Fregoli delusion: a disorder of person identification and tracking. Topics in cognitive science, 6(4), 615-631.

  • Leddington, J. (2016). The experience of magic. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism., 74(3), 253–264.

  • Loftus, E. F. (2003). Make-believe memories. American Psychologist, 58(11), 867.

  • Macknik, S. L., King, M., Randi, J., Robbins, A., Thompson, J., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2008). Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9(11), 871-879.

  • Maertens, M., & Pollmann, S. (2005). fMRI reveals a common neural substrate of illusory and real contours in V1 after perceptual learning. Journal of cognitive neuroscience17, 1553-1564.

  • Muhl-Richardson, A., Parker, M. G., Recio, S. A., Tortosa-Molina, M., Daffron, J. L., & Davis, G. J. (2021). Improved X-ray baggage screening sensitivity with ‘targetless’ search training. Cognitive research: principles and implications, 6(1), 1-20.

  • Näsholm, E., Rohlfing, S., & Sauer, J. D. (2014). Pirate stealth or inattentional blindness? The effects of target relevance and sustained attention on security monitoring for experienced and naïve operators. PLoS One, 9(1), e86157.

  • Olson, J. A., Cyr, M., Artenie, D. Z., Strandberg, T., Hall, L., Tompkins, M. L., ... & Johansson, P. (2023). Emulating future neurotechnology using magic. Consciousness and Cognition, 107, 103450.

  • Otgaar, H., Howe, M. L., & Dodier, O. (2022). What can expert witnesses reliably say about memory in the courtroom?. Forensic science international: mind and law, 3, 100106.

  • Randi, J. (2007, June 24). Implying data that isn’t there: Or how an audience can be lulled into eagerly accepting suggestions and unspoken information. Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness 11th Annual Meeting, Las Vegas, NV, USA.

  • Rensink, R. A., & Kuhn, G. (2015). A framework for using magic to study the mind. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 1508.

  • Thomas, C., Didierjean, A., & Nicolas, S. (2016). Scientific study of magic: Binet’s pioneering approach based on observations and chronophotography. The American Journal of Psychology, 129(3), 313-326.

  • Tompkins, M. L. (2021). A Science of Magic Bibliography. https://www.matt-tompkins.com/blog/2021/3/29/a-science-of-magic-bibliography-2021-update

  • Tompkins, M. L. (2017, June). Blinded by séance: The man who offered scientists an afterlife. New Scientist, 3130, pp. 42-43. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431300-800-blinded-by-seance-the-man-who-offered-scientists-an-afterlife/

  • Tompkins, M. L. (2019). The Spectacle of Illusion: Magic, the paranormal & the complicity of the mind. London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN: 978-1-942884-37-8

  • Wundt, W. (1879). Spiritualism as a scientific question. An open letter to Professor Hermann Ulrici, of Halle. Popular Science Monthly, 15, 577-593.



A Science of Magic Bibliography: 2021 Update

Science of Magic Bibliography (1887 – Present)

Inclusion Criteria: All publications listed describe experimental research related to performance magic or magicians. This list is limited to studies involving adult participants. This list does not include reviews, commentaries, theoretical papers, or surveys. 

Numbering: Studies are listed by year of publication, and studies are ordered alphabetically by author within each year

Please Cite as: Tompkins, M. L. (2021). A Science of Magic Bibliography. https://www.matt-tompkins.com/blog/2021/3/29/a-science-of-magic-bibliography-2021-update

MagicTimelineGrowth2021.jpg

Science of Magic Bibliography (1887 – Present)

 

Inclusion Criteria: All publications listed describe experimental research related to adults experiencing or performing magic. This list does not include reviews, commentaries, theoretical papers, or surveys. 

Numbering: The list is ordered by year of publication, and studies are ordered alphabetically by author within each year

 

 

1.       Hodgson, R., and S. J. Davy. (1887). The possibilities of mal-observation and lapse of memory from a practical point of view. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 4, 381-495.


2.      Jastrow, J. (1896). Psychological notes upon sleight-of-hand experts. Science, 3, 685-689.


3.      Triplett, N. (1900). The psychology of conjuring deceptions. The American Journal of Psychology, 11, 439-510.


4.     Besterman, T. (1932). The psychology of testimony in relation to paraphysical phenomena: Report of an experiment. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 40, 363-387.


5.      Marcuse, F. L., & Bitterman, M. E. (1944). A classroom demonstration of "psychical phenomena." The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 39, 238-243.


6.     Benassi, V. A Singer, B., & Reynolds, C.B. (1980). Occult Belief: Seeing is believing, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 19, 337.


7.      Jones, W. H. and D. Russell. (1980). The selective processing of belief disconfirming information. European Journal of Social Psychology, 10, 309-312.


8.     Trinkaus, J. (1980). Preconditioning an audience for mental magic: An informal look. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 51, 262.


9.     Smith, M. D. (1993). The effect of belief in the paranormal and prior set upon the observation of a ‘psychic’ demonstration. European Journal of Parapsychology, 9, 24-34.


10. Wiseman, R., & Morris, R. L. (1995). Recalling pseudo‐psychic demonstrations. British Journal of Psychology, 86, 113-125.


11.   Subbotsky, E. (1996). Explaining impossible phenomena: object permanence beliefs and memory failures in adults. Memory, 4, 199-233.


12.  Subbotsky, E. (1997). Explanations of unusual events: phenomenalistic causal judgements in children and adults. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15, 13-36.


13.  Subbotsky, E. (2001). Causal explanations of events by children and adults: Can alternative causal modes coexist in one mind? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 19, 23-46.


14.  Subbotsky, E. & Quinteros, G. (2002). Do cultural factors affect causal beliefs? Rational and magical thinking in Britain and Mexico. British Journal of Psychology, 93, 519-543.


15.  Wiseman, R., Greening, E., & Smith, M. (2003). Belief in the paranormal and suggestion in the séance room. British Journal of Psychology, 94, 285-297.


16.  Hergovich, A. (2004). The effect of pseudo-psychic demonstrations as dependent on belief in paranormal phenomena and suggestibility. Personality and Individual Differences, 36, 365-380.


17.  Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikstrom, S., & Olsson, A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310, 116-119.


18.  Kuhn, G. & Tatler, B. W. (2005). Magic and fixation: Now you don't see it, now you do. Perception, 34, 1153-1161.


19.  Wiseman, R., & Greening, E. (2005). It's still bending: Verbal suggestion and alleged psychokinetic ability. British Journal of Psychology, 96, 115-127.


20.Kuhn, G. & Land, M. F. (2006). There's more to magic than meets the eye! Current Biology. 16, R950.


21.  Linney, Y. M., & Peters, E. R. (2007). The psychological processes underlying symptoms of thought interference in psychosis. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 45, 2726-2741.


22. Kuhn, G. & Tatler, B. W. Findlay J.M. Cole G. G. (2008). Misdirection in magic: Implications for the relationship between eye gaze and attention. Visual Cognition, 16, 391-405.

23. Kuhn, G., Tatler, B. W., & Cole, G. G. (2009). You look where I look! Effect of gaze cues on overt and covert attention in misdirection. Visual cognition, 17(6-7), 925-944.

24. Parris, B. A., Kuhn, G., Mizon, G. A., Benattayallah, A., & Hodgson, T. L. (2009). Imaging the impossible: An fMRI study of impossible causal relationships in magic tricks. Neuroimage, 45, 1033-1039.


25. Hall, L., Johansson, P., Tärning, B., Sikström, S., & Deutgen, T. (2010). Magic at the marketplace: Choice blindness for the taste of jam and the smell of tea. Cognition, 117, 54–61. 


26. Kuhn, G. Kourkoulou, A. Leekam, S.R. (2010). How magic changes our expectations about autism. Psychological Science, 21, 1487-93.


27. Kuhn, G., & Findlay, J. M. (2010). Misdirection, attention and awareness: Inattentional blindness reveals temporal relationship between eye movements and visual awareness. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,63, 136-146.


28. Subbotsky, E. (2010). Curiosity and exploratory behavior toward possible and impossible events in children and adults. British Journal of Psychology, 101, 481-501.


29. Cavina-Pratesi, C., Kuhn, G., Ietswaart, M., Milner, A. D. (2011). The Magic Grasp: Motor Expertise in Deception. PLoS ONE, 6, e16568. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0016568


30.Cui, J., Otero-Millan, J., Macknik, S. L., King, M., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2011). Social misdirection fails to enhance a magic illusion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5, 103. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00103


31.  Hergovich, A., Gröbl, K., & Carbon, C. C. (2011). The paddle move commonly used in magic tricks as a means for analysing the perceptual limits of combined motion trajectories. Perception 40, 358.


32. Otero-Millan, J., Macknik, S. L., Robbins, A., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2011). Stronger misdirection in curved than in straight motion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00133


33. Demacheva, I., Ladouceur, M., Steinberg, E., Pogossova, G., & Raz, A. (2012). The Applied Cognitive Psychology of Attention: A Step Closer to Understanding Magic Tricks. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26, 541-549.


34. Hall, L., Johansson, P., & Strandberg, T. (2012). Lifting the veil of morality: Choice blindness and attitude reversals on a self-transforming survey. PloS one, 7, e45457. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045457


35. Smith, T. J., Lamont, P., & Henderson, J. M. (2012). The penny drops: Change blindness at fixation. Perception, 41, 489-492.


36. Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., von Müller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2013). Aha! experiences leave a mark: facilitated recall of insight solutions. Psychological Research, 77, 659-669.


37. Hall, L., Strandberg, T., Pärnamets, P., Lind, A., Tärning, B., & Johansson, P. (2013). How the polls can be both spot on and dead wrong: Using choice blindness to shift political attitudes and voter intentions. PloS one, 8, e60554. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060554


38. Johansson, P., Hall, L., Tärning, B., Sikström, S., & Chater, N. (2013). Choice Blindness and Preference Change: You Will Like This Paper Better If You (Believe You) Chose to Read It! Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. doi: 10.1002/bdm.1807


39. Rieiro, H., Martinez-Conde, S., & Macknik, S. L. (2013). Perceptual elements in Penn & Teller’s “Cups and Balls” magic trick. PeerJ, 1, e19. doi: 10.7717/peerj.19


40.      Shalom, D. E., de Sousa Serro, M. G., Giaconia, M., Martinez, L. M., Rieznik, A., & Sigman, M. (2013). Choosing in Freedom or Forced to Choose? Introspective Blindness to Psychological Forcing in Stage-Magic. PloS one,8, e58254. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0058254


41.  Smith, T. J., Lamont, P., & Henderson, J. M. (2013). Change blindness in a dynamic scene due to endogenous override of exogenous attentional cues. Perception, 42, 884-886.

42.  Taylor, H. E., Parker, S., Mansell, W., & Morrison, A. P. (2013). Effects of appraisals of anomalous experience on distress in people at risk of psychosis. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 41(1), 24–33.


43. Ward, T. A., Gaynor, K. J., Hunter, M. D., Woodruff, P. W., Garety, P. A., & Peters, E. R. (2013). Appraisals and responses to experimental symptom analogues in clinical and nonclinical individuals with psychotic experiences. Schizophrenia Bulletin, sbt094.


44. Aardema, F., & Johansson, P. (2014). Choice Blindness, Confabulatory Introspection, and Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms: A New Area of Investigation. International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 7, 83–102.

45. Ali, S. S., Lifshitz, M., & Raz, A. (2014). Empirical neuroenchantment: from reading minds to thinking critically. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 357.

46. Barnhart, A. S., & Goldinger, S. D. (2014). Blinded by magic: Eye-movements reveal the misdirection of attention. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01461.


47. Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., von Müller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2014a). It’s a kind of magic—what self-reports can reveal about the phenomenology of insight problem solving. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1408. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01408

48.Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., Von Mueller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2014b). Working Wonders? Investigating insight with magic tricks. Cognition, 130, 174-185.


49. Williams, H., & McOwan, P. W. (2014). Magic in the machine: a computational magician's assistant. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01283


50. Wilson, K. & French C. C. (2014) Magic and memory: Using conjuring to explore the effects of suggestion, social influence and paranormal belief on eyewitness testimony for an ostensibly paranormal event. Frontiers in Psychology. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01289


51.  Beth, T., & Ekroll, V. (2015). The curious influence of timing on the magical experience evoked by conjuring tricks involving false transfer: decay of amodal object permanence? Psychological Research, 79, 513-522


52. Bouvet, R., & Bonnefon, J. F. (2015). Non-reflective thinkers are predisposed to attribute supernatural causation to uncanny experiences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41, 955-961.


53. Danek, A.H., Öllinger, M., Fraps, T., Grothe, B., & Flanagin, V.L. (2015). An fMRI investigation of expectation violation in magic tricks. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 84.


54. Mohr, C., Koutrakis, N., & Kuhn, G. (2015). Priming psychic and conjuring abilities of a magic demonstration influences event interpretation and random number generation biases. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01542


55. Olson, J., Amlani, A., & Rensink, R. (2015). Using magic to influence choice in the absence of visual awareness. Consciousness and Cognition, 37, 225- 236.


56. Olson, J. A., Demacheva, I., & Raz, A. (2015). Explanations of a magic trick across the life span. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00219


57.  Phillips, F., Natter, M. B., & Egan, E. J. (2015). Magically deceptive biological motion—the French Drop sleight. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 371. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00371

58. Smith, T. J. (2015). The role of audience participation and task relevance on change detection during a card trick. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00013


59. Tachibana, R., & Gyoba, J. (2015). Effects of different types of misdirection on attention and detection performance. Took Psychologic Folia, 74, 42-56.


60.      Tachibana, R., & Kawabata, H. (2015). The effects of social misdirection on magic tricks: How deceived and undeceived groups differ. i-Perception, 5, 143-146. doi: 10.1068/i0640sas 


61.  Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2015). No need for a social cue! A masked magician can also trick the audience in the vanishing ball illusion. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 78(1), 21–29. doi:10.3758/s13414-015-1036-9 


62. Caffaratti, H., Navajas, J., Rey, H. G., & Quian Quiroga, R. (2016). Where is the ball? behavioral and neural responses elicited by a magic trick. Psychophysiology. 53, 1441-1448. 


63. Hedne, M. R., Norman, E., & Metcalfe, J. (2016). Intuitive Feelings of Warmth and Confidence in Insight and Noninsight Problem Solving of Magic Tricks. Frontiers in Psychology, 7.

64. Hergovich, A., & Oberfichtner, B. (2016). Magic and Misdirection: The Influence of Social Cues on the Allocation of Visual Attention While Watching a Cups-and-Balls Routine. Frontiers in Psychology, 761.


65. Kuhn, G., & Rensink, R. A. (2016). The vanishing ball illusion: A new perspective on the perception of dynamic events. Cognition, 148, 64-70.


66. Kuhn, G., Teszka, R., Tenaw, N., & Kingstone, A. (2016). Don’t be fooled! Attentional responses to social cues in a face-to-face and video magic trick reveals greater top-down control for overt than covert attention. Cognition, 146, 136-142.


67. Olson, J. A., Landry, M., Appourchaux, K., & Raz, A. (2016). Simulated thought insertion: Influencing the sense of agency using deception and magic. Consciousness and Cognition, 43, 11-26.


68.Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2016a). The ball vanishes in the air: can we blame representational momentum? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(6), 1810–1817. 

69. Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2016b). Magicians fix your mind: How unlikely solutions block obvious ones. Cognition, 154, 169-173.


70. Tompkins, M. L., Woods, A. T., & Aimola Davies, A. M. (2016). Phantom Vanish magic trick: Investigating the disappearance of a non-existent object in a dynamic scene. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 950.

71.  Underwood, R., Kumari, V., & Peters, E. (2016). Appraisals of psychotic experiences: An experimental investigation of symptomatic, remitted and non-need-for-care individuals. Psychological Medicine, 46(6), 1249–1263


72. Williams, H., & McOwan, P. W. (2016). Magic in Pieces: An Analysis of Magic Trick Construction Using Artificial Intelligence as a Design Aid. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 30, 16-28.


73. Wiseman, R. J., & Nakano, T. (2016). Blink and you’ll miss it: the role of blinking in the perception of magic tricks. PeerJ, 4, e1873.

74. Danek, A. H., & Wiley, J. (2017). What about false insights? Deconstructing the Aha! experience along its multiple dimensions for correct and incorrect solutions separately. Frontiers in Psychology7, 2077.



75.  Kawakami, N., & Miura, E. (2017). Can Magic Deception Be Detected at an Unconscious Level? Perception46(6), 698-708.

76. Lin, J. L., Cheng, M. F., Lin, S. Y., Chang, J. Y., Chang, Y. C., Li, H. W., & Lin, D. M. (2017). The effects of combining inquiry-based teaching with science magic on the learning outcomes of a friction unit. Journal of Baltic Science Education16, 218-227. 



77.  Moss, S. A., Irons, M., & Boland, M. (2017). The magic of magic: The effect of magic tricks on subsequent engagement with lecture material. British Journal of Educational Psychology87(1), 32-42.



78. Rieznik, A., Moscovich, L., Frieiro, A., Figini, J., Catalano, R., Garrido, J. M., Heduan, F. A., Sigman, M., & Gonzalez, P. A. (2017). A massive experiment on choice blindness in political decisions: Confidence, confabulation, and unconscious detection of self-deception. PloS one, 12(2), e0171108.

79. Rinsma, T., van der Kamp, J., Dicks, M., & Cañal-Bruland, R. (2017). Nothing magical: pantomimed grasping is controlled by the ventral system. Experimental brain research, 235(6), 1823-1833

80.     Bagnoli, F., Guarino, A., & Pacini, G. (2018). Teaching physics by magic. Physics Education, 54(1), 015025.


81.  Barnhart, A. S., Ehlert, M. J., Goldinger, S. D., & Mackey, A. D. (2018). Cross-modal attentional entertainment: Insights from magicians. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 1-10.

82. Cocchini, G., Galligan, T., Mora, L., & Kuhn, G. (2018). The magic hand: Plasticity of mental hand representation. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71(11), 2314–2324.



83. Ekroll, V., De Bruyckere, E., Vanwezemael, L., & Wagemans, J. (2018). Never Repeat the Same Trick Twice—Unless it is Cognitively Impenetrable. i-Perception9, 2041669518816711.


84.Kuhn, G., & Teszka, R. (2018). Don’t get misdirected! Differences in overt and covert attentional inhibition between children and adults. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology71(3), 688-694.



85. Lan, Y., Mohr, C., Hu, X., & Kuhn, G. (2018). Fake science: The impact of pseudo-psychological demonstrations on people’s beliefs in psychological principles. PLOS ONE, 13(11), e0207629. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0207629 


86.Lesaffre, L., Kuhn, G., Abu-Akel, A., Rochat, D., & Mohr, C. (2018). Magic performances-When explained in psychic terms by university students. Frontiers in Psychology9, 2129.



87. Ortega, J., Montañes, P., Barnhart, A., & Kuhn, G. (2018). Exploiting failures in metacognition through magic: Visual awareness as a source of visual metacognition bias. Consciousness and cognition65, 152-168.



88.      Schönauer, M., Brodt, S., Pöhlchen, D., Breßmer, A., Danek, A. H., & Gais, S. (2018). Sleep Does Not Promote Solving Classical Insight Problems and Magic Tricks. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00072 



89.Strandberg, T., Sivén, D., Hall, L., Johansson, P., & Pärnamets, P. (2018). False beliefs and confabulation can lead to lasting changes in political attitudes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(9), 1382-1399. 



90.      Thomas, C., Didierjean, A., & Kuhn, G. (2018). The Flushtration Count Illusion: Attribute substitution tricks our interpretation of a simple visual event sequence. British Journal of Psychology, 109, 850-861. 

91.  Thomas, C., Didierjean, A., & Kuhn, G. (2018). It is magic! How impossible solutions prevent the discovery of obvious ones? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71, 2481-2487.



92.     Barnhart, A. S., Costela, F. M., Martinez-Conde, S., Macknik, S. L., & Goldinger, S. D. (2019). Microsaccades reflect the dynamics of misdirected attention in magic. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 12 (6), doi.org/10.16910/jemr.12.6.7


93.     Danek, A. H., & Flanagin, V. L. (2019). Cognitive conflict and restructuring: The neural basis of two core components of insight. AIMS Neuroscience, 6(2), 60. 


94.     Gygax, P., Thomas, C., Didierjean, A., & Kuhn, G. (2019). Are women perceived as worse magicians than men? Social Psychological Bulletin, 14(3), 1-19.


95.      Ikhsanudin, I., Sudarsono, S., & Salam, U. Using Magic Trick Problem-Based Activities to Improve Students' Engagement in a Listening Class. JELTIM (Journal of English Language Teaching Innovation and Materials), 1(1), 7-15.


96.     Mansour, H., & Kuhn, G. (2019). Studying “natural” eye movements in an “unnatural” social environment: The influence of social activity, framing, and sub-clinical traits on gaze aversion. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72(8), 1913-1925. 


97. Øhrn, H., Svalebjørg, M., Andersen, S., Ring, A. E., & Ekroll, V. (2019). A perceptual illusion of empty space can create a perceptual illusion of levitation. i-Perception, 10(6), 2041669519897681. 


98.     Pétervári, J., & Danek, A. H. (2019). Problem solving of magic tricks: guiding to and through an impasse with solution cues, Thinking & Reasoning, DOI: 10.1080/13546783.2019.1668479


99.     Scott, H., Batten, J. P., & Kuhn, G. (2019). Why are you looking at me? It’s because I’m talking, but mostly because I’m staring or not doing much. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 81(1), 109-118. doi:10.3758/s13414-018-1588-6

100.Wong, S. F., Aardema, F., Giraldo-O’Meara, M., Hall, L., & Johansson, P. (2019). Choice Blindness, Confabulatory Introspection, and Obsessive–Compulsive Symptoms: Investigation in a Clinical Sample. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 1-10. 


101.  Yao, R., Wood, K., & Simons, D. J. (2019). As if by magic: An abrupt change in motion direction induces change blindness. Psychological science, 30(3), 436-443.

102. Bestue, D., Martínez, L. M., Gomez-Marin, A., Gea, M. A., & Camí, J. (2020). Long-term memory of real-world episodes is independent of recency effects: magic tricks as ecological tasks. Heliyon, 6(10), e05260.

103. Danek, A. H., & Wiley, J. (2020). What causes the insight memory advantage? Cognition, 205, 104411.

104. Danek, A.H., Williams, J. & Wiley, J. Closing the gap: connecting sudden representational change to the subjective Aha! experience in insightful problem solving. Psychological Research, 84, 111–119 (2020). doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-0977-8

105. Dergisi, T. E. (2020). Opinions on the use of magic card tricks in teaching English to young learners. Trakya Journal of Education, 10, 263-275.

106. Kuhn, G., Pailhès, A., & Lan, Y. (2020). Forcing you to experience wonder: Unconsciously biasing people’s choice through strategic physical positioning. Consciousness and Cognition80, 102902.

107.  Kumar, M., & John, S. (2020). Attitude of Higher Secondary School Teachers towards the Use of Magic Tricks in the Classroom. Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 9(2), 47-47.

108. Lau, J. K. L., Ozono, H., Kuratomi, K., Komiya, A., & Murayama, K. (2020). Shared striatal activity in decisions to satisfy curiosity and hunger at the risk of electric shocks. Nature human behaviour4(5), 531-543.

109. Lesaffre, L., Kuhn, G., Jopp, D. S., Mantzouranis, G., Diouf, C. N., Rochat, D., & Mohr, C. (2020). Talking to the Dead in the Classroom: How a Supposedly Psychic Event Impacts Beliefs and Feelings. Psychological Reports, 0033294120961068.

110.  Li, T. (2020). Use of magic performance as a schema disruption method to facilitate flexible thinking. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 38, 100735.

111.    Pailhès, A., & Kuhn, G. (2020). Subtly encouraging more deliberate decisions: using a forcing technique and population stereotype to investigate free will. Psychological research, 1-11.

112.   Pailhès, A., & Kuhn, G. (2020). Influencing choices with conversational primes: How a magic trick unconsciously influences card choices. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(30), 17675-17679.

113.   Pailhès, A., & Kuhn, G. (2020). The apparent action causation: Using a magician forcing technique to investigate our illusory sense of agency over the outcome of our choices. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 73(11), 1784-1795.

114.   Pailhès, A., Kumari, S., & Kuhn, G. (2020). The Magician’s Choice: Providing illusory choice and sense of agency with the Equivoque forcing technique. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

115.   Pétervári, J., & Danek, A. H. (2020). Problem solving of magic tricks: guiding to and through an impasse with solution cues. Thinking & Reasoning, 26(4), 502-533.

116.   Quarona, D., Koul, A., Ansuini, C., Pascolini, L., Cavallo, A., & Becchio, C. (2020). A kind of magic: Enhanced detection of pantomimed grasps in professional magicians. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 73(7), 1092-1100.

117.   Rummel, J., Iwan, F., Steindorf, L., & Danek, A. H. (2020). The role of attention for insight problem solving: Effects of mindless and mindful incubation periods. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 1-13.

118.  Strandberg, T., Olson, J. A., Hall, L., Woods, A., & Johansson, P. (2020). Depolarizing American voters: Democrats and Republicans are equally susceptible to false attitude feedback. PloS one, 15(2), e0226799.

119.   Svalebjørg, M., Øhrn, H., & Ekroll, V. (2020). The illusion of absence in magic tricks. i-Perception, 11(3), 2041669520928383.

120. Ward, T., Garety, P. A., Jackson, M., & Peters, E. (2020). Clinical and theoretical relevance of responses to analogues of psychotic experiences in people with psychotic experiences with and without a need-for-care: An experimental study. Psychological Medicine, 50(5), 761–770. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291719000576

121.   Wiseman, R., Houstoun, W., & Watt, C. (2020). Pedagogic prestidigitation: using magic tricks to enhance educational videos. PeerJ, 8, e9610.

122.  Ozono, H., Komiya, A., Kuratomi, K., Hatano, A., Fastrich, G., Raw, J. A. L., Haffey, A., Melissa, S., Lab, J. K. L., & Murayama, K. (2021). Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): A novel stimulus collection to induce epistemic emotions. Behavior Research Methods, 53(1), 188-215.

A Science of Magic Bibliography- 2020 Update

***The latest 2021 update is NOW viewable HERE***

‘The Science of Magic’ continues to represent a productive vein of empirical research. The following figure illustrates that magic has been a topic of interest since the earliest days of experimental psychology and that contemporary researchers are now publishing new magic research at an unprecedented rate.

Inclusion Criteria: Publications listed report empirical research related to adults experiencing or performing magic. This list does not include reviews, commentaries, theoretical papers, or surveys.

Numbering: The list is ordered by year of publication, and studies are ordered alphabetically by author within each year

Please cite as: Tompkins, M. L. (2020). A Science of Magic Bibliography. Retrieved from www.matt-tompkins.com/blog/2020/2/29/a-science-of-magic-bibliography-2020-update

MagicTimelineGrowth2019.jpg

1.       Hodgson, R., and S. J. Davy. (1887). The possibilities of mal-observation and lapse of memory from a practical point of view. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 4, 381-495.


2.      Jastrow, J. (1896). Psychological notes upon sleight-of-hand experts. Science, 3, 685-689.


3.      Triplett, N. (1900). The psychology of conjuring deceptions. The American Journal of Psychology, 11, 439-510.


4.     Besterman, T. (1932). The psychology of testimony in relation to paraphysical phenomena: Report of an experiment. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 40, 363-387.


5.      Marcuse, F. L., & Bitterman, M. E. (1944). A classroom demonstration of "psychical phenomena." The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 39, 238-243.


6.     Benassi, V. A Singer, B., & Reynolds, C.B. (1980). Occult Belief: Seeing is believing, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 19, 337.


7.      Jones, W. H. and D. Russell. (1980). The selective processing of belief disconfirming information. European Journal of Social Psychology, 10, 309-312.


8.     Trinkaus, J. (1980). Preconditioning an audience for mental magic: An informal look. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 51, 262.


9.     Smith, M. D. (1993). The effect of belief in the paranormal and prior set upon the observation of a ‘psychic’ demonstration. European Journal of Parapsychology, 9, 24-34.


10. Wiseman, R., & Morris, R. L. (1995). Recalling pseudo‐psychic demonstrations. British Journal of Psychology, 86, 113-125.


11.   Subbotsky, E. (1996). Explaining impossible phenomena: object permanence beliefs and memory failures in adults. Memory, 4, 199-233.


12.  Subbotsky, E. (1997). Explanations of unusual events: phenomenalistic causal judgements in children and adults. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15, 13-36.


13.  Subbotsky, E. (2001). Causal explanations of events by children and adults: Can alternative causal modes coexist in one mind? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 19, 23-46.


14.  Subbotsky, E. & Quinteros, G. (2002). Do cultural factors affect causal beliefs? Rational and magical thinking in Britain and Mexico. British Journal of Psychology, 93, 519-543.


15.  Wiseman, R., Greening, E., & Smith, M. (2003). Belief in the paranormal and suggestion in the séance room. British Journal of Psychology, 94, 285-297.


16.  Hergovich, A. (2004). The effect of pseudo-psychic demonstrations as dependent on belief in paranormal phenomena and suggestibility. Personality and Individual Differences, 36, 365-380.


17.  Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikstrom, S., & Olsson, A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310, 116-119.


18.  Kuhn, G. & Tatler, B. W. (2005). Magic and fixation: Now you don't see it, now you do. Perception, 34, 1153-1161.


19.  Wiseman, R., & Greening, E. (2005). It's still bending: Verbal suggestion and alleged psychokinetic ability. British Journal of Psychology, 96, 115-127.


20.Kuhn, G. & Land, M. F. (2006). There's more to magic than meets the eye! Current Biology. 16, R950.


21.  Linney, Y. M., & Peters, E. R. (2007). The psychological processes underlying symptoms of thought interference in psychosis. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 45, 2726-2741.


22. Kuhn, G. & Tatler, B. W. Findlay J.M. Cole G. G. (2008). Misdirection in magic: Implications for the relationship between eye gaze and attention. Visual Cognition, 16, 391-405.

23. Kuhn, G., Tatler, B. W., & Cole, G. G. (2009). You look where I look! Effect of gaze cues on overt and covert attention in misdirection. Visual cognition, 17(6-7), 925-944.

24. Parris, B. A., Kuhn, G., Mizon, G. A., Benattayallah, A., & Hodgson, T. L. (2009). Imaging the impossible: An fMRI study of impossible causal relationships in magic tricks. Neuroimage, 45, 1033-1039.


25. Hall, L., Johansson, P., Tärning, B., Sikström, S., & Deutgen, T. (2010). Magic at the marketplace: Choice blindness for the taste of jam and the smell of tea. Cognition, 117, 54–61. 


26. Kuhn, G. Kourkoulou, A. Leekam, S.R. (2010). How magic changes our expectations about autism. Psychological Science, 21, 1487-93.


27. Kuhn, G., & Findlay, J. M. (2010). Misdirection, attention and awareness: Inattentional blindness reveals temporal relationship between eye movements and visual awareness. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,63, 136-146.


28. Subbotsky, E. (2010). Curiosity and exploratory behavior toward possible and impossible events in children and adults. British Journal of Psychology, 101, 481-501.


29. Cavina-Pratesi, C., Kuhn, G., Ietswaart, M., Milner, A. D. (2011). The Magic Grasp: Motor Expertise in Deception. PLoS ONE, 6, e16568. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0016568


30.Cui, J., Otero-Millan, J., Macknik, S. L., King, M., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2011). Social misdirection fails to enhance a magic illusion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5, 103. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00103


31.  Hergovich, A., Gröbl, K., & Carbon, C. C. (2011). The paddle move commonly used in magic tricks as a means for analysing the perceptual limits of combined motion trajectories. Perception 40, 358.


32. Otero-Millan, J., Macknik, S. L., Robbins, A., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2011). Stronger misdirection in curved than in straight motion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00133


33. Demacheva, I., Ladouceur, M., Steinberg, E., Pogossova, G., & Raz, A. (2012). The Applied Cognitive Psychology of Attention: A Step Closer to Understanding Magic Tricks. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26, 541-549.


34. Hall, L., Johansson, P., & Strandberg, T. (2012). Lifting the veil of morality: Choice blindness and attitude reversals on a self-transforming survey. PloS one, 7, e45457. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045457


35. Smith, T. J., Lamont, P., & Henderson, J. M. (2012). The penny drops: Change blindness at fixation. Perception, 41, 489-492.


36. Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., von Müller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2013). Aha! experiences leave a mark: facilitated recall of insight solutions. Psychological Research, 77, 659-669.


37. Hall, L., Strandberg, T., Pärnamets, P., Lind, A., Tärning, B., & Johansson, P. (2013). How the polls can be both spot on and dead wrong: Using choice blindness to shift political attitudes and voter intentions. PloS one, 8, e60554. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060554


38. Johansson, P., Hall, L., Tärning, B., Sikström, S., & Chater, N. (2013). Choice Blindness and Preference Change: You Will Like This Paper Better If You (Believe You) Chose to Read It! Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. doi: 10.1002/bdm.1807


39. Rieiro, H., Martinez-Conde, S., & Macknik, S. L. (2013). Perceptual elements in Penn & Teller’s “Cups and Balls” magic trick. PeerJ, 1, e19. doi: 10.7717/peerj.19


40.      Shalom, D. E., de Sousa Serro, M. G., Giaconia, M., Martinez, L. M., Rieznik, A., & Sigman, M. (2013). Choosing in Freedom or Forced to Choose? Introspective Blindness to Psychological Forcing in Stage-Magic. PloS one,8, e58254. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0058254


41.  Smith, T. J., Lamont, P., & Henderson, J. M. (2013). Change blindness in a dynamic scene due to endogenous override of exogenous attentional cues. Perception, 42, 884-886.

42.  Taylor, H. E., Parker, S., Mansell, W., & Morrison, A. P. (2013). Effects of appraisals of anomalous experience on distress in people at risk of psychosis. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 41(1), 24–33.


43. Ward, T. A., Gaynor, K. J., Hunter, M. D., Woodruff, P. W., Garety, P. A., & Peters, E. R. (2013). Appraisals and responses to experimental symptom analogues in clinical and nonclinical individuals with psychotic experiences. Schizophrenia Bulletin, sbt094.


44. Aardema, F., & Johansson, P. (2014). Choice Blindness, Confabulatory Introspection, and Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms: A New Area of Investigation. International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 7, 83–102.

45. Ali, S. S., Lifshitz, M., & Raz, A. (2014). Empirical neuroenchantment: from reading minds to thinking critically. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 357.

46. Barnhart, A. S., & Goldinger, S. D. (2014). Blinded by magic: Eye-movements reveal the misdirection of attention. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01461.


47. Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., von Müller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2014a). It’s a kind of magic—what self-reports can reveal about the phenomenology of insight problem solving. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1408. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01408

48.Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., Von Mueller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2014b). Working Wonders? Investigating insight with magic tricks. Cognition, 130, 174-185.


49. Williams, H., & McOwan, P. W. (2014). Magic in the machine: a computational magician's assistant. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01283


50. Wilson, K. & French C. C. (2014) Magic and memory: Using conjuring to explore the effects of suggestion, social influence and paranormal belief on eyewitness testimony for an ostensibly paranormal event. Frontiers in Psychology. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01289


51.  Beth, T., & Ekroll, V. (2015). The curious influence of timing on the magical experience evoked by conjuring tricks involving false transfer: decay of amodal object permanence? Psychological Research, 79, 513-522


52. Bouvet, R., & Bonnefon, J. F. (2015). Non-reflective thinkers are predisposed to attribute supernatural causation to uncanny experiences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41, 955-961.


53. Danek, A.H., Öllinger, M., Fraps, T., Grothe, B., & Flanagin, V.L. (2015). An fMRI investigation of expectation violation in magic tricks. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 84.


54. Mohr, C., Koutrakis, N., & Kuhn, G. (2015). Priming psychic and conjuring abilities of a magic demonstration influences event interpretation and random number generation biases. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01542


55. Olson, J., Amlani, A., & Rensink, R. (2015). Using magic to influence choice in the absence of visual awareness. Consciousness and Cognition, 37, 225- 236.


56. Olson, J. A., Demacheva, I., & Raz, A. (2015). Explanations of a magic trick across the life span. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00219


57.  Phillips, F., Natter, M. B., & Egan, E. J. (2015). Magically deceptive biological motion—the French Drop sleight. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 371. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00371

58. Smith, T. J. (2015). The role of audience participation and task relevance on change detection during a card trick. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00013


59. Tachibana, R., & Gyoba, J. (2015). Effects of different types of misdirection on attention and detection performance. Took Psychologic Folia, 74, 42-56.


60.      Tachibana, R., & Kawabata, H. (2015). The effects of social misdirection on magic tricks: How deceived and undeceived groups differ. i-Perception, 5, 143-146. doi: 10.1068/i0640sas 


61.  Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2015). No need for a social cue! A masked magician can also trick the audience in the vanishing ball illusion. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 78(1), 21–29. doi:10.3758/s13414-015-1036-9 


62. Caffaratti, H., Navajas, J., Rey, H. G., & Quian Quiroga, R. (2016). Where is the ball? behavioral and neural responses elicited by a magic trick. Psychophysiology. 53, 1441-1448. 


63. Hedne, M. R., Norman, E., & Metcalfe, J. (2016). Intuitive Feelings of Warmth and Confidence in Insight and Noninsight Problem Solving of Magic Tricks. Frontiers in Psychology, 7.

64. Hergovich, A., & Oberfichtner, B. (2016). Magic and Misdirection: The Influence of Social Cues on the Allocation of Visual Attention While Watching a Cups-and-Balls Routine. Frontiers in Psychology, 761.


65. Kuhn, G., & Rensink, R. A. (2016). The vanishing ball illusion: A new perspective on the perception of dynamic events. Cognition, 148, 64-70.


66. Kuhn, G., Teszka, R., Tenaw, N., & Kingstone, A. (2016). Don’t be fooled! Attentional responses to social cues in a face-to-face and video magic trick reveals greater top-down control for overt than covert attention. Cognition, 146, 136-142.


67. Olson, J. A., Landry, M., Appourchaux, K., & Raz, A. (2016). Simulated thought insertion: Influencing the sense of agency using deception and magic. Consciousness and Cognition, 43, 11-26.


68.Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2016a). The ball vanishes in the air: can we blame representational momentum? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(6), 1810–1817. 

69. Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2016b). Magicians fix your mind: How unlikely solutions block obvious ones. Cognition, 154, 169-173.


70. Tompkins, M. L., Woods, A. T., & Aimola Davies, A. M. (2016). Phantom Vanish magic trick: Investigating the disappearance of a non-existent object in a dynamic scene. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 950.

71.  Underwood, R., Kumari, V., & Peters, E. (2016). Appraisals of psychotic experiences: An experimental investigation of symptomatic, remitted and non-need-for-care individuals. Psychological Medicine, 46(6), 1249–1263


72. Williams, H., & McOwan, P. W. (2016). Magic in Pieces: An Analysis of Magic Trick Construction Using Artificial Intelligence as a Design Aid. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 30, 16-28.


73. Wiseman, R. J., & Nakano, T. (2016). Blink and you’ll miss it: the role of blinking in the perception of magic tricks. PeerJ, 4, e1873.

Science of Magic Bibliography- 2018 Update

***The latest 2021 update is NOW viewable HERE***

The Science of Magic continues represent a productive vein of empirical research.

To the best of my knowledge this is a complete list of experiments (please do let me know if you think I've missed one). That being said, this list is limited to experiments and does NOT include reviews, commentaries, theoretical papers, or surveys. Furthermore, the list only includes studies involving adult participants. 

Leuven_Seminar.png

 

Please cite as: Tompkins, M. L. (2018). Science of Magic Bibliography. Retrieved from www.matt-tompkins.com/blog/2018/12/19/science-of-magic-bibliography-2018-update

1.       Hodgson, R., and S. J. Davy. (1887). The possibilities of mal-observation and lapse of memory from a practical point of view. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 4, 381-495.


2.      Jastrow, J. (1896). Psychological notes upon sleight-of-hand experts. Science, 3, 685-689.


3.      Triplett, N. (1900). The psychology of conjuring deceptions. The American Journal of Psychology, 11, 439-510.


4.     Besterman, T. (1932). The psychology of testimony in relation to paraphysical phenomena: Report of an experiment. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 40, 363-387.


5.      Marcuse, F. L., & Bitterman, M. E. (1944). A classroom demonstration of "psychical phenomena." The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 39, 238-243.


6.     Benassi, V. A Singer, B., & Reynolds, C.B. (1980). Occult Belief: Seeing is believing, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 19, 337.


7.      Jones, W. H. and D. Russell. (1980). The selective processing of belief disconfirming information. European Journal of Social Psychology, 10, 309-312.


8.     Trinkaus, J. (1980). Preconditioning an audience for mental magic: An informal look. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 51, 262.


9.     Smith, M. D. (1993). The effect of belief in the paranormal and prior set upon the observation of a ‘psychic’ demonstration. European Journal of Parapsychology, 9, 24-34.


10. Wiseman, R., & Morris, R. L. (1995). Recalling pseudo‐psychic demonstrations. British Journal of Psychology, 86, 113-125.


11.   Subbotsky, E. (1996). Explaining impossible phenomena: object permanence beliefs and memory failures in adults. Memory, 4, 199-233.


12.  Subbotsky, E. (1997). Explanations of unusual events: phenomenalistic causal judgements in children and adults. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15, 13-36.


13.  Subbotsky, E. (2001). Causal explanations of events by children and adults: Can alternative causal modes coexist in one mind? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 19, 23-46.


14.  Subbotsky, E. & Quinteros, G. (2002). Do cultural factors affect causal beliefs? Rational and magical thinking in Britain and Mexico. British Journal of Psychology, 93, 519-543.


15.  Wiseman, R., Greening, E., & Smith, M. (2003). Belief in the paranormal and suggestion in the séance room. British Journal of Psychology, 94, 285-297.


16.  Hergovich, A. (2004). The effect of pseudo-psychic demonstrations as dependent on belief in paranormal phenomena and suggestibility. Personality and Individual Differences, 36, 365-380.


17.  Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikstrom, S., & Olsson, A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310, 116-119.


18.  Kuhn, G. & Tatler, B. W. (2005). Magic and fixation: Now you don't see it, now you do. Perception, 34, 1153-1161.


19.  Wiseman, R., & Greening, E. (2005). It's still bending: Verbal suggestion and alleged psychokinetic ability. British Journal of Psychology, 96, 115-127.


20.Kuhn, G. & Land, M. F. (2006). There's more to magic than meets the eye! Current Biology. 16, R950.


21.  Linney, Y. M., & Peters, E. R. (2007). The psychological processes underlying symptoms of thought interference in psychosis. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 45, 2726-2741.


22. Kuhn, G. & Tatler, B. W. Findlay J.M. Cole G. G. (2008). Misdirection in magic: Implications for the relationship between eye gaze and attention. Visual Cognition, 16, 391-405.

23. Kuhn, G., Tatler, B. W., & Cole, G. G. (2009). You look where I look! Effect of gaze cues on overt and covert attention in misdirection. Visual cognition, 17(6-7), 925-944.

24. Parris, B. A., Kuhn, G., Mizon, G. A., Benattayallah, A., & Hodgson, T. L. (2009). Imaging the impossible: An fMRI study of impossible causal relationships in magic tricks. Neuroimage, 45, 1033-1039.


25. Hall, L., Johansson, P., Tärning, B., Sikström, S., & Deutgen, T. (2010). Magic at the marketplace: Choice blindness for the taste of jam and the smell of tea. Cognition, 117, 54–61. 


26. Kuhn, G. Kourkoulou, A. Leekam, S.R. (2010). How magic changes our expectations about autism. Psychological Science, 21, 1487-93.


27. Kuhn, G., & Findlay, J. M. (2010). Misdirection, attention and awareness: Inattentional blindness reveals temporal relationship between eye movements and visual awareness. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,63, 136-146.


28. Subbotsky, E. (2010). Curiosity and exploratory behavior toward possible and impossible events in children and adults. British Journal of Psychology, 101, 481-501.


29. Cavina-Pratesi, C., Kuhn, G., Ietswaart, M., Milner, A. D. (2011). The Magic Grasp: Motor Expertise in Deception. PLoS ONE, 6, e16568. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0016568


30.Cui, J., Otero-Millan, J., Macknik, S. L., King, M., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2011). Social misdirection fails to enhance a magic illusion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5, 103. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00103


31.  Hergovich, A., Gröbl, K., & Carbon, C. C. (2011). The paddle move commonly used in magic tricks as a means for analysing the perceptual limits of combined motion trajectories. Perception 40, 358.


32. Otero-Millan, J., Macknik, S. L., Robbins, A., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2011). Stronger misdirection in curved than in straight motion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00133


33. Demacheva, I., Ladouceur, M., Steinberg, E., Pogossova, G., & Raz, A. (2012). The Applied Cognitive Psychology of Attention: A Step Closer to Understanding Magic Tricks. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26, 541-549.


34. Hall, L., Johansson, P., & Strandberg, T. (2012). Lifting the veil of morality: Choice blindness and attitude reversals on a self-transforming survey. PloS one, 7, e45457. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045457


35. Smith, T. J., Lamont, P., & Henderson, J. M. (2012). The penny drops: Change blindness at fixation. Perception, 41, 489-492.


36. Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., von Müller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2013). Aha! experiences leave a mark: facilitated recall of insight solutions. Psychological Research, 77, 659-669.


37. Hall, L., Strandberg, T., Pärnamets, P., Lind, A., Tärning, B., & Johansson, P. (2013). How the polls can be both spot on and dead wrong: Using choice blindness to shift political attitudes and voter intentions. PloS one, 8, e60554. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060554


38. Johansson, P., Hall, L., Tärning, B., Sikström, S., & Chater, N. (2013). Choice Blindness and Preference Change: You Will Like This Paper Better If You (Believe You) Chose to Read It! Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. doi: 10.1002/bdm.1807


39. Rieiro, H., Martinez-Conde, S., & Macknik, S. L. (2013). Perceptual elements in Penn & Teller’s “Cups and Balls” magic trick. PeerJ, 1, e19. doi: 10.7717/peerj.19


40.      Shalom, D. E., de Sousa Serro, M. G., Giaconia, M., Martinez, L. M., Rieznik, A., & Sigman, M. (2013). Choosing in Freedom or Forced to Choose? Introspective Blindness to Psychological Forcing in Stage-Magic. PloS one,8, e58254. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0058254


41.  Smith, T. J., Lamont, P., & Henderson, J. M. (2013). Change blindness in a dynamic scene due to endogenous override of exogenous attentional cues. Perception, 42, 884-886.

42.  Taylor, H. E., Parker, S., Mansell, W., & Morrison, A. P. (2013). Effects of appraisals of anomalous experience on distress in people at risk of psychosis. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 41(1), 24–33.


43. Ward, T. A., Gaynor, K. J., Hunter, M. D., Woodruff, P. W., Garety, P. A., & Peters, E. R. (2013). Appraisals and responses to experimental symptom analogues in clinical and nonclinical individuals with psychotic experiences. Schizophrenia Bulletin, sbt094.


44. Aardema, F., & Johansson, P. (2014). Choice Blindness, Confabulatory Introspection, and Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms: A New Area of Investigation. International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 7, 83–102.

45. Ali, S. S., Lifshitz, M., & Raz, A. (2014). Empirical neuroenchantment: from reading minds to thinking critically. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 357.

46. Barnhart, A. S., & Goldinger, S. D. (2014). Blinded by magic: Eye-movements reveal the misdirection of attention. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01461.


47. Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., von Müller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2014a). It’s a kind of magic—what self-reports can reveal about the phenomenology of insight problem solving. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1408. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01408

48.Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., Von Mueller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2014b). Working Wonders? Investigating insight with magic tricks. Cognition, 130, 174-185.


49. Williams, H., & McOwan, P. W. (2014). Magic in the machine: a computational magician's assistant. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01283


50. Wilson, K. & French C. C. (2014) Magic and memory: Using conjuring to explore the effects of suggestion, social influence and paranormal belief on eyewitness testimony for an ostensibly paranormal event. Frontiers in Psychology. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01289


51.  Beth, T., & Ekroll, V. (2015). The curious influence of timing on the magical experience evoked by conjuring tricks involving false transfer: decay of amodal object permanence? Psychological Research, 79, 513-522


52. Bouvet, R., & Bonnefon, J. F. (2015). Non-reflective thinkers are predisposed to attribute supernatural causation to uncanny experiences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41, 955-961.


53. Danek, A.H., Öllinger, M., Fraps, T., Grothe, B., & Flanagin, V.L. (2015). An fMRI investigation of expectation violation in magic tricks. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 84.


54. Mohr, C., Koutrakis, N., & Kuhn, G. (2015). Priming psychic and conjuring abilities of a magic demonstration influences event interpretation and random number generation biases. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01542


55. Olson, J., Amlani, A., & Rensink, R. (2015). Using magic to influence choice in the absence of visual awareness. Consciousness and Cognition, 37, 225- 236.


56. Olson, J. A., Demacheva, I., & Raz, A. (2015). Explanations of a magic trick across the life span. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00219


57.  Phillips, F., Natter, M. B., & Egan, E. J. (2015). Magically deceptive biological motion—the French Drop sleight. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 371. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00371

58. Smith, T. J. (2015). The role of audience participation and task relevance on change detection during a card trick. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00013


59. Tachibana, R., & Gyoba, J. (2015). Effects of different types of misdirection on attention and detection performance. Took Psychologic Folia, 74, 42-56.


60.      Tachibana, R., & Kawabata, H. (2015). The effects of social misdirection on magic tricks: How deceived and undeceived groups differ. i-Perception, 5, 143-146. doi: 10.1068/i0640sas 


61.  Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2015). No need for a social cue! A masked magician can also trick the audience in the vanishing ball illusion. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 78(1), 21–29. doi:10.3758/s13414-015-1036-9 


62. Caffaratti, H., Navajas, J., Rey, H. G., & Quian Quiroga, R. (2016). Where is the ball? behavioral and neural responses elicited by a magic trick. Psychophysiology. 53, 1441-1448. 


63. Hedne, M. R., Norman, E., & Metcalfe, J. (2016). Intuitive Feelings of Warmth and Confidence in Insight and Noninsight Problem Solving of Magic Tricks. Frontiers in Psychology, 7.

64. Hergovich, A., & Oberfichtner, B. (2016). Magic and Misdirection: The Influence of Social Cues on the Allocation of Visual Attention While Watching a Cups-and-Balls Routine. Frontiers in Psychology, 761.


65. Kuhn, G., & Rensink, R. A. (2016). The vanishing ball illusion: A new perspective on the perception of dynamic events. Cognition, 148, 64-70.


66. Kuhn, G., Teszka, R., Tenaw, N., & Kingstone, A. (2016). Don’t be fooled! Attentional responses to social cues in a face-to-face and video magic trick reveals greater top-down control for overt than covert attention. Cognition, 146, 136-142.


67. Olson, J. A., Landry, M., Appourchaux, K., & Raz, A. (2016). Simulated thought insertion: Influencing the sense of agency using deception and magic. Consciousness and Cognition, 43, 11-26.


68.Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2016a). The ball vanishes in the air: can we blame representational momentum? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(6), 1810–1817. 

69. Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2016b). Magicians fix your mind: How unlikely solutions block obvious ones. Cognition, 154, 169-173.


70. Tompkins, M. L., Woods, A. T., & Aimola Davies, A. M. (2016). Phantom Vanish magic trick: Investigating the disappearance of a non-existent object in a dynamic scene. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 950.

71.  Underwood, R., Kumari, V., & Peters, E. (2016). Appraisals of psychotic experiences: An experimental investigation of symptomatic, remitted and non-need-for-care individuals. Psychological Medicine, 46(6), 1249–1263


72. Williams, H., & McOwan, P. W. (2016). Magic in Pieces: An Analysis of Magic Trick Construction Using Artificial Intelligence as a Design Aid. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 30, 16-28.


73. Wiseman, R. J., & Nakano, T. (2016). Blink and you’ll miss it: the role of blinking in the perception of magic tricks. PeerJ, 4, e1873.

A Science of Magic Bibliography

In the past 15 years, the scientific investigation of magic has undergone something of a renaissance. Since the year 2000, the body of experimental scientific literature on the topic of performance magic has more than quintupled, relative to all of the experimental work published in preceding years, as far back as the late 1800s. Within the last 15 years 61 empirical papers have been published on the topic. Only 12 such papers were published between 1887 and 1999. The figure illustrates two key points: Firstly, this recent level of focus on the topic is arguably relatively novel, and secondly, the idea of studying the psychology of magic can traced back at least as far as concept of psychology as formal scientific discipline. 

In the process of writing my doctoral thesis, I've put together a list of published peer-reviewed articles that have involved empirical laboratory investigations of magic or magicians. 

To the best of my knowledge this is a complete list of experiments (please do let me know if you think I've missed one). That being said, this list is limited to experiments and does NOT include reviews, commentaries, theoretical papers, or surveys. Furthermore, the list only includes studies involving adult participants. 

 

Please cite as: Tompkins, M. L. (2016). Science of Magic Bibliography. Retrieved from http://www.matt-tompkins.co/blog/2016/9/23/a-science-of-magic-bibliography

1.       Hodgson, R., and S. J. Davy. (1887). The possibilities of mal-observation and lapse of memory from a practical point of view. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 4, 381-495.


2.      Jastrow, J. (1896). Psychological notes upon sleight-of-hand experts. Science, 3, 685-689.


3.      Triplett, N. (1900). The psychology of conjuring deceptions. The American Journal of Psychology, 11, 439-510.


4.     Besterman, T. (1932). The psychology of testimony in relation to paraphysical phenomena: Report of an experiment. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 40, 363-387.


5.      Marcuse, F. L., & Bitterman, M. E. (1944). A classroom demonstration of "psychical phenomena." The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 39, 238-243.


6.     Benassi, V. A Singer, B., & Reynolds, C.B. (1980). Occult Belief: Seeing is believing, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 19, 337.


7.      Jones, W. H. and D. Russell. (1980). The selective processing of belief disconfirming information. European Journal of Social Psychology, 10, 309-312.


8.     Trinkaus, J. (1980). Preconditioning an audience for mental magic: An informal look. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 51, 262.


9.     Smith, M. D. (1993). The effect of belief in the paranormal and prior set upon the observation of a ‘psychic’ demonstration. European Journal of Parapsychology, 9, 24-34.


10. Wiseman, R., & Morris, R. L. (1995). Recalling pseudo‐psychic demonstrations. British Journal of Psychology, 86, 113-125.


11.   Subbotsky, E. (1996). Explaining impossible phenomena: object permanence beliefs and memory failures in adults. Memory, 4, 199-233.


12.  Subbotsky, E. (1997). Explanations of unusual events: phenomenalistic causal judgements in children and adults. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15, 13-36.


13.  Subbotsky, E. (2001). Causal explanations of events by children and adults: Can alternative causal modes coexist in one mind? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 19, 23-46.


14.  Subbotsky, E. & Quinteros, G. (2002). Do cultural factors affect causal beliefs? Rational and magical thinking in Britain and Mexico. British Journal of Psychology, 93, 519-543.


15.  Wiseman, R., Greening, E., & Smith, M. (2003). Belief in the paranormal and suggestion in the séance room. British Journal of Psychology, 94, 285-297.


16.  Hergovich, A. (2004). The effect of pseudo-psychic demonstrations as dependent on belief in paranormal phenomena and suggestibility. Personality and Individual Differences, 36, 365-380.


17.  Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikstrom, S., & Olsson, A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310, 116-119.


18.  Kuhn, G. & Tatler, B. W. (2005). Magic and fixation: Now you don't see it, now you do. Perception, 34, 1153-1161.


19.  Wiseman, R., & Greening, E. (2005). It's still bending: Verbal suggestion and alleged psychokinetic ability. British Journal of Psychology, 96, 115-127.


20.Kuhn, G. & Land, M. F. (2006). There's more to magic than meets the eye! Current Biology. 16, R950.


21.  Linney, Y. M., & Peters, E. R. (2007). The psychological processes underlying symptoms of thought interference in psychosis. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 45, 2726-2741.


22. Kuhn, G. & Tatler, B. W. Findlay J.M. Cole G. G. (2008). Misdirection in magic: Implications for the relationship between eye gaze and attention. Visual Cognition, 16, 391-405.

23. Kuhn, G., Tatler, B. W., & Cole, G. G. (2009). You look where I look! Effect of gaze cues on overt and covert attention in misdirection. Visual cognition, 17(6-7), 925-944.

24. Parris, B. A., Kuhn, G., Mizon, G. A., Benattayallah, A., & Hodgson, T. L. (2009). Imaging the impossible: An fMRI study of impossible causal relationships in magic tricks. Neuroimage, 45, 1033-1039.


25. Hall, L., Johansson, P., Tärning, B., Sikström, S., & Deutgen, T. (2010). Magic at the marketplace: Choice blindness for the taste of jam and the smell of tea. Cognition, 117, 54–61. 


26. Kuhn, G. Kourkoulou, A. Leekam, S.R. (2010). How magic changes our expectations about autism. Psychological Science, 21, 1487-93.


27. Kuhn, G., & Findlay, J. M. (2010). Misdirection, attention and awareness: Inattentional blindness reveals temporal relationship between eye movements and visual awareness. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,63, 136-146.


28. Subbotsky, E. (2010). Curiosity and exploratory behavior toward possible and impossible events in children and adults. British Journal of Psychology, 101, 481-501.


29. Cavina-Pratesi, C., Kuhn, G., Ietswaart, M., Milner, A. D. (2011). The Magic Grasp: Motor Expertise in Deception. PLoS ONE, 6, e16568. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0016568


30.Cui, J., Otero-Millan, J., Macknik, S. L., King, M., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2011). Social misdirection fails to enhance a magic illusion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5, 103. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00103


31.  Hergovich, A., Gröbl, K., & Carbon, C. C. (2011). The paddle move commonly used in magic tricks as a means for analysing the perceptual limits of combined motion trajectories. Perception 40, 358.


32. Otero-Millan, J., Macknik, S. L., Robbins, A., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2011). Stronger misdirection in curved than in straight motion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00133


33. Demacheva, I., Ladouceur, M., Steinberg, E., Pogossova, G., & Raz, A. (2012). The Applied Cognitive Psychology of Attention: A Step Closer to Understanding Magic Tricks. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26, 541-549.


34. Hall, L., Johansson, P., & Strandberg, T. (2012). Lifting the veil of morality: Choice blindness and attitude reversals on a self-transforming survey. PloS one, 7, e45457. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045457


35. Smith, T. J., Lamont, P., & Henderson, J. M. (2012). The penny drops: Change blindness at fixation. Perception, 41, 489-492.


36. Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., von Müller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2013). Aha! experiences leave a mark: facilitated recall of insight solutions. Psychological Research, 77, 659-669.


37. Hall, L., Strandberg, T., Pärnamets, P., Lind, A., Tärning, B., & Johansson, P. (2013). How the polls can be both spot on and dead wrong: Using choice blindness to shift political attitudes and voter intentions. PloS one, 8, e60554. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060554


38. Johansson, P., Hall, L., Tärning, B., Sikström, S., & Chater, N. (2013). Choice Blindness and Preference Change: You Will Like This Paper Better If You (Believe You) Chose to Read It! Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. doi: 10.1002/bdm.1807


39. Rieiro, H., Martinez-Conde, S., & Macknik, S. L. (2013). Perceptual elements in Penn & Teller’s “Cups and Balls” magic trick. PeerJ, 1, e19. doi: 10.7717/peerj.19


40.      Shalom, D. E., de Sousa Serro, M. G., Giaconia, M., Martinez, L. M., Rieznik, A., & Sigman, M. (2013). Choosing in Freedom or Forced to Choose? Introspective Blindness to Psychological Forcing in Stage-Magic. PloS one,8, e58254. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0058254


41.  Smith, T. J., Lamont, P., & Henderson, J. M. (2013). Change blindness in a dynamic scene due to endogenous override of exogenous attentional cues. Perception, 42, 884-886.

42.  Taylor, H. E., Parker, S., Mansell, W., & Morrison, A. P. (2013). Effects of appraisals of anomalous experience on distress in people at risk of psychosis. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 41(1), 24–33.


43. Ward, T. A., Gaynor, K. J., Hunter, M. D., Woodruff, P. W., Garety, P. A., & Peters, E. R. (2013). Appraisals and responses to experimental symptom analogues in clinical and nonclinical individuals with psychotic experiences. Schizophrenia Bulletin, sbt094.


44. Aardema, F., & Johansson, P. (2014). Choice Blindness, Confabulatory Introspection, and Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms: A New Area of Investigation. International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 7, 83–102.

45. Ali, S. S., Lifshitz, M., & Raz, A. (2014). Empirical neuroenchantment: from reading minds to thinking critically. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 357.

46. Barnhart, A. S., & Goldinger, S. D. (2014). Blinded by magic: Eye-movements reveal the misdirection of attention. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01461.


47. Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., von Müller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2014a). It’s a kind of magic—what self-reports can reveal about the phenomenology of insight problem solving. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1408. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01408

48.Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., Von Mueller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2014b). Working Wonders? Investigating insight with magic tricks. Cognition, 130, 174-185.


49. Williams, H., & McOwan, P. W. (2014). Magic in the machine: a computational magician's assistant. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01283


50. Wilson, K. & French C. C. (2014) Magic and memory: Using conjuring to explore the effects of suggestion, social influence and paranormal belief on eyewitness testimony for an ostensibly paranormal event. Frontiers in Psychology. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01289


51.  Beth, T., & Ekroll, V. (2015). The curious influence of timing on the magical experience evoked by conjuring tricks involving false transfer: decay of amodal object permanence? Psychological Research, 79, 513-522


52. Bouvet, R., & Bonnefon, J. F. (2015). Non-reflective thinkers are predisposed to attribute supernatural causation to uncanny experiences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41, 955-961.


53. Danek, A.H., Öllinger, M., Fraps, T., Grothe, B., & Flanagin, V.L. (2015). An fMRI investigation of expectation violation in magic tricks. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 84.


54. Mohr, C., Koutrakis, N., & Kuhn, G. (2015). Priming psychic and conjuring abilities of a magic demonstration influences event interpretation and random number generation biases. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01542


55. Olson, J., Amlani, A., & Rensink, R. (2015). Using magic to influence choice in the absence of visual awareness. Consciousness and Cognition, 37, 225- 236.


56. Olson, J. A., Demacheva, I., & Raz, A. (2015). Explanations of a magic trick across the life span. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00219


57.  Phillips, F., Natter, M. B., & Egan, E. J. (2015). Magically deceptive biological motion—the French Drop sleight. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 371. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00371

58. Smith, T. J. (2015). The role of audience participation and task relevance on change detection during a card trick. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00013


59. Tachibana, R., & Gyoba, J. (2015). Effects of different types of misdirection on attention and detection performance. Took Psychologic Folia, 74, 42-56.


60.      Tachibana, R., & Kawabata, H. (2015). The effects of social misdirection on magic tricks: How deceived and undeceived groups differ. i-Perception, 5, 143-146. doi: 10.1068/i0640sas 


61.  Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2015). No need for a social cue! A masked magician can also trick the audience in the vanishing ball illusion. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 78(1), 21–29. doi:10.3758/s13414-015-1036-9 


62. Caffaratti, H., Navajas, J., Rey, H. G., & Quian Quiroga, R. (2016). Where is the ball? behavioral and neural responses elicited by a magic trick. Psychophysiology. 53, 1441-1448. 


63. Hedne, M. R., Norman, E., & Metcalfe, J. (2016). Intuitive Feelings of Warmth and Confidence in Insight and Noninsight Problem Solving of Magic Tricks. Frontiers in Psychology, 7.

64. Hergovich, A., & Oberfichtner, B. (2016). Magic and Misdirection: The Influence of Social Cues on the Allocation of Visual Attention While Watching a Cups-and-Balls Routine. Frontiers in Psychology, 761.


65. Kuhn, G., & Rensink, R. A. (2016). The vanishing ball illusion: A new perspective on the perception of dynamic events. Cognition, 148, 64-70.


66. Kuhn, G., Teszka, R., Tenaw, N., & Kingstone, A. (2016). Don’t be fooled! Attentional responses to social cues in a face-to-face and video magic trick reveals greater top-down control for overt than covert attention. Cognition, 146, 136-142.


67. Olson, J. A., Landry, M., Appourchaux, K., & Raz, A. (2016). Simulated thought insertion: Influencing the sense of agency using deception and magic. Consciousness and Cognition, 43, 11-26.


68.Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2016a). The ball vanishes in the air: can we blame representational momentum? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(6), 1810–1817. 

69. Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2016b). Magicians fix your mind: How unlikely solutions block obvious ones. Cognition, 154, 169-173.


70. Tompkins, M. L., Woods, A. T., & Aimola Davies, A. M. (2016). Phantom Vanish magic trick: Investigating the disappearance of a non-existent object in a dynamic scene. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 950.

71.  Underwood, R., Kumari, V., & Peters, E. (2016). Appraisals of psychotic experiences: An experimental investigation of symptomatic, remitted and non-need-for-care individuals. Psychological Medicine, 46(6), 1249–1263


72. Williams, H., & McOwan, P. W. (2016). Magic in Pieces: An Analysis of Magic Trick Construction Using Artificial Intelligence as a Design Aid. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 30, 16-28.


73. Wiseman, R. J., & Nakano, T. (2016). Blink and you’ll miss it: the role of blinking in the perception of magic tricks. PeerJ, 4, e1873.