For Elias Garcia-Pellegrin, Learning Magic Started as a way to earn some extra money as an undergraduate student. These days, the University of Cambridge researcher performs for an unlikely audience – it probably doesn’t pay well.
To better understand vision and comprehension, Garcia-Pellegrin performs magical tricks for animals. In the new report, he and colleagues make a case for a turn on the magical, scientifically useful and possibly a really good time.
Coincidentally, Garcia-Pellegrin was not the only person in her lab with a magical background – her supervisor has performed on the magic show for almost a decade. Colleagues began discussing the role of magic in the study of human intelligence, and how similar principles could be applied to animals.
Those ideas are outlined in a paper published in the journal Thursday Science. The authors argue to use it “Magical structure” In animal experiments to better understand comprehension and vision.
Magical tricks work on humans because of the delicate balance of expectations and the wrong direction. Our understanding of the permanence of the Object object and the blind spots that focus entirely on it – deception is possible – have tempted us to respond to magic through the language of the human body. They argue that experiments with “magical structures” may reveal whether the same is true in animals.
“We know that people are fooled by magical effects – otherwise magicians will not get jobs,” says Garcia-Pellegrin. Busy. “The question is, will they work in animals? And if they do, what do their meditation processes and cognitive processes mean?”
On YouTube, at least there is no shortage of animal videos Appear The floor will be floor by magic.
The fact that there are so many videos suggests that it is possible to include non-humans in the wonders of magic. But what are the animals expressing The real surprise?
It’s complicated, Garcia-Pellegrin explains.
When a human being sits in a magic show, his experience is organized by many understandable factors: for example, the magician is there as entertainment, not danger. Humans understand that an object that disappears before their eyes is part of the joy because, to an extent, the audience lives in it.
The trick may be surprising for the trick, “but it’s just great because you understand that I don’t mean to hurt you,” says Garcia-Pellegrin.
The sorcerer’s deception, after all, can react very differently in animals. By default, using food for tricks with animals makes sense as a means of attracting attention.
“However, if you make the food disappear in front of them, they may be more annoyed by the surprise,” says Garcia-Pellegrin.
That doesn’t mean magic doesn’t work – it’s just a different outcome. And suggests that without an experiment designed with control, we can’t say exactly what reaction we’re seeing on YouTube. That’s why Garcia-Pellegrin and colleagues want to bring more animal magic to the lab.
Magic in the lab – How the animal responds to misdirection, delusion and hand sleep can find special features in the animal’s comprehension.
“Magic is a violation of expectation in its purest form,” says Garcia-Pellegrin. “If you were used to flying or objects or disappearing from mid-air, magic would not surprise you.”
Animal research topics need to understand certain concepts – elements like gravity and general intuition about the way the world works – to understand magical tricks like humans.
In humans, previous research has shown that deceiving a man with an invisible ball is based on both what the viewer expects and what the magician gives social signals. In animals, Garcia-Pellegrin argues to use a similar tactic to study their assumption of the ball’s disappearance and to determine whether past experiences or current expectations change that perception.
He and other scientists are already doing this at Cambridge’s Comparative Comprehension Laboratory. Laboratory researchers study how the cognitive abilities of animals vary among species, including members of the crow family and cephalopods.
Examining how animals react to perishable things can bring new ideas about animal expectations and whether new body language influences animal audiences, Garcia-Pellegrin explains. You can see an example of this kind of trick – invisible peanut balls for bha – below.
Animals also need to be able to stabilize object objects, to understand when an object object disappears, humans learn something as a child. The authors suggest how-it-th-thoughts would be for investigating parallel mechanisms in humans and animals, the authors suggest.
Magic in nature – Doing magic for an animal audience can tell us something new about perception. But even in the wild some animals already have their own delusions. Magicians will use the wrong direction as a tool to control the audience’s attention and distract them from learning the mechanics behind the illusion.
Chimpanzees and birds do the same.
Chimps uses a movement that researchers call “strategic deception,” which involves moving his gaze away from raising objections to mislead a competitor. Jays protect food by hiding it in one place, sticking its beak to the ground as bluff, but actually stashing it in another place.
The fact that these tricks work in nature suggests that animals have adapted to absorb blind spots like human attention – which allows us to be overwhelmed by magic.
In the future, Garcia-Pelegrin hopes the research can answer three key questions about the animal’s understanding of magic:
- Are magical tricks the same as those that fool humans Also works for animals
- What parts of the trick fooled the animal, And what it means about how animals perceive the world
- How animals Encode tricks into their behavior – For example being upset, annoyed, strange or refusing to eat food
Garcia-Pellegrin and colleagues have noted that in order to distract an animal, you need to put it in the first place. Some species may not pay humans enough to be good subjects of study – or they are as social as penguins, the experiments are thrown away.
Whatever the outcome of future experiments, empirical evidence of animals Can be in magic Already there, says Garcia-Pellegrin: “If the animals hadn’t realized it, we wouldn’t have 10,000 videos on YouTube.”
