Division of Neurobiology, Barrow Neurological Institute Phoenix, AZ, USA.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2011 Sep 29;5:103. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00103. eCollection 2011.
Visual, multisensory and cognitive illusions in magic performances provide new windows into the psychological and neural principles of perception, attention, and cognition. We investigated a magic effect consisting of a coin "vanish" (i.e., the perceptual disappearance of a coin after a simulated toss from hand to hand). Previous research has shown that magicians can use joint attention cues such as their own gaze direction to strengthen the observers' perception of magic. Here we presented naïve observers with videos including real and simulated coin tosses to determine if joint attention might enhance the illusory perception of simulated coin tosses. The observers' eye positions were measured, and their perceptual responses simultaneously recorded via button press. To control for the magician's use of joint attention cues, we occluded his head in half of the trials. We found that subjects did not direct their gaze at the magician's face at the time of the coin toss, whether the face was visible or occluded, and that the presence of the magician's face did not enhance the illusion. Thus, our results show that joint attention is not necessary for the perception of this effect. We conclude that social misdirection is redundant and possibly detracting to this very robust sleight-of-hand illusion. We further determined that subjects required multiple trials to effectively distinguish real from simulated tosses; thus the illusion was resilient to repeated viewing.
魔术表演中的视觉、多感官和认知错觉为我们研究感知、注意和认知的心理和神经原则提供了新的窗口。我们研究了一种魔术效果，其中包括一枚硬币“消失”（即，在模拟从手中抛出后，硬币的视觉消失）。先前的研究表明，魔术师可以使用共同注意线索（例如自己的注视方向）来增强观察者对魔术的感知。在这里，我们向天真的观察者展示了包括真实和模拟抛硬币的视频，以确定共同注意是否可以增强对模拟抛硬币的错觉感知。我们测量了观察者的眼动位置，并通过按钮按下同时记录他们的感知反应。为了控制魔术师使用共同注意线索，我们在一半的试验中遮挡了他的头部。我们发现，无论头部是否可见或遮挡，观察者在抛硬币时都没有注视魔术师的脸，而且魔术师的脸的存在也没有增强错觉。因此，我们的结果表明，共同注意不是感知这种效果所必需的。我们得出的结论是，社交误导是多余的，并且可能会对这种非常强大的手法错觉产生影响。我们进一步确定，受试者需要多次试验才能有效区分真实和模拟抛硬币；因此，这种错觉对重复观看具有很强的抵抗力。
