Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2017 Jan;12(1):91-106. doi: 10.1177/1745691616654676.
When magicians perform spectacles that seem to defy the laws of nature, they do so by manipulating psychological reality. Hence, the principles underlying the art of conjuring are potentially of interest to psychological science. Here, we argue that perceptual and cognitive principles governing how humans experience hidden things and reason about them play a central role in many magic tricks. Different from tricks based on many other forms of misdirection, which require considerable skill on the part of the magician, many elements of these tricks are essentially self-working because they rely on automatic perceptual and cognitive processes. Since these processes are not directly observable, even experienced magicians may be oblivious to their central role in creating strong magical experiences and tricks that are almost impossible to debunk, even after repeated presentations. We delineate how insights from perceptual psychology provide a framework for understanding why these tricks work so well. Conversely, we argue that studying magic tricks that work much better than one intuitively would believe provides a promising heuristic for charting unexplored aspects of perception and cognition.
当魔术师表演那些看似违背自然规律的奇观时，他们是通过操纵心理现实来做到这一点的。因此，魔术艺术背后的原理可能对心理科学具有潜在的兴趣。在这里，我们认为，人类体验隐藏事物和推理的感知和认知原则在许多魔术中起着核心作用。与基于其他许多误导形式的技巧不同，这些技巧需要魔术师具备相当的技巧，许多技巧的元素本质上是自动的，因为它们依赖于自动的感知和认知过程。由于这些过程无法直接观察到，即使是经验丰富的魔术师也可能没有意识到它们在创造强烈的魔术体验和几乎不可能揭穿的技巧方面的核心作用，即使在多次展示之后也是如此。我们阐述了感知心理学的见解如何为理解这些技巧为何如此有效的原因提供了一个框架。相反，我们认为，研究比人们直观上认为的要好得多的魔术技巧为探索感知和认知的未知方面提供了一个很有前途的启发式方法。
