November 29, 2006

• Ooooo Ooooo It's MAGIC.

  Edited and condensed from a LiveScience article by Charles Q Choi, Nov 20 2006.

  
  

  Researchers looked into a magic trick called the "vanishing ball," in which a ball apparently disappears in midair.  It's done by faking a throw while keeping the ball secretly palmed in the magician's hand.

  
  

  Kuhn videotaped himself performing the illusion.  In the fake throw, his gaze and head followed an imaginary ball moving upwards. Roughly two-thirds of volunteers watching the illusion on television had a vivid recollection of the ball leaving the top of the screen. "Often they claimed someone at the top of the screen caught the ball," Kuhn said.

  
  

  Kuhn and his colleagues measured the eye movements of volunteers during the experiment.  Surprisingly, they found that when people believed they saw the ball vanish, most claimed they spent their entire time looking at the ball, yet most actually glanced at the magician's face prior to following the ball to help them perceive the ball's location.

  
  

  "Even though people claimed they were looking at the ball, what you find is that they spend a lot of time looking at the face.  While their eye movements weren't fooled by where the ball was, their perception was. It reveals how important social cues are in influencing perception," Kuhn said.

  
  

  "As we are looking at the world, we have this impression that what we see is the real world.  What this tells us is the way we see the world is more strongly dominated by how we perceive it to be,  rather than what it actually is," Kuhn added.

  
  

  "Even though the ball never left the hand, the reason people saw it leave is because they expected the ball to leave the hand.  It's the beliefs about what should happen that override the actual visual input."

  
  

  What? You didn't see me actually make a comment, did you?.  No.  You have a comment?

  • 7:42 am
  • 7 Comments