Citation

Kuhn G, Olson JA, Raz A. Front. Psychol. 2016; 7: e1358.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Frontiers Research Foundation)

DOI

10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01358

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Conjurors are masters of illusion and deception, and they have developed astonishing methods for manipulating our experience. Intuitively, the link between magic and psychology seems obvious: magicians use techniques such as misdirection to manipulate our attention, illusions to distort our perception, and forcing to influence our decisions. Some of the early pioneers in Psychology (e.g., Binet, 1894; Triplett, 1900) recognized this close link between magic and psychology and published fascinating scientific papers investigating conjuring techniques. Although some researchers have used magic tricks to study cognition indirectly (e.g., developmental psychologists), few have attempted to bind magic to the science of psychology.

In 2005, Kuhn and Tatler published one of the first recent papers on misdirection, which illustrated how conjuring principles can be used to study visual attention (Kuhn and Tatler, 2005). Whilst this paper attracted much popular interest, many scientists at the time were skeptical about the idea of using magic to explore the inner working of the mind. Although the relationship between magic and psychology is intuitive, this approach requires new paradigms and possibly new ways of thinking about cognitive mechanisms. However, because few researchers have access to the secret armamentarium of magical techniques, studying magic scientifically became the privilege of a small group of investigators with direct experience in conjuring. And yet, the last decade has seen a surge in research papers that have used magic to explore a wide range of topics in psychology. Concrete frameworks now explain how magic can be studied scientifically and the advantages that this direction may provide (Kuhn et al., 2008; Macknik et al., 2008; Demacheva et al., 2012). What was once a field restricted to a few scientists has rapidly grown into a vibrant research domain...

Language: en