A Selection of Recordings from SoMA 2022
The following talks were recorded at our latest London conference. Due to some technical issues at the venue, we weren’t able to record as many talks as we’d hoped, but the following videos still represent an excellent selection of content from the conference.
Anthony Barnhart:
Tactical Blinking in Magicians
Magicians frequently rehearse their sleight of hand before a mirror in order to gain the perspective of their audience. However, magic instructors often warn that this practice can lead to self-deception, as many novice magicians unconsciously blink their eyes when engaging in deceptive action, thereby blinding themselves to evidence of their proficiency. There are few concrete examples of self-deception in the literature that provide definitive evidence in support of deep self-deception, where a person both knows the truth and pushes that truth outside their consciousness. In the experiment presented here, we attempted to elicit magicians’ blinking behavior under well-controlled laboratory conditions and to identify variables that impact a performer’s tendency to engage in it. We invited magicians to learn a difficult set of coin magic sleights over the course of a week and to perform the routine in a rehearsal setting (with a mirror) and a performance setting (without a mirror). We quantified blink rates in the videos of these performances. Indeed, magicians were more likely to blink when engaging in deceptive action than when not, and blinking was more prevalent when performing more difficult sleights. However, this tactical blinking was only evident in the performance setting. We suggest that rather than serving as self-deception, tactical blinking may enhance deception of the audience through encouragement of synchronized blinking in spectators. Alternatively, selfdeception may emerge later in the learning process, after some basic motor proficiency has been established. 10:30 Deceptive combinations and counterfactuals:
Peta Masters:
An Experimental Study of ‘The Veil Principle’
Magicians often deploy two or more deceptive mechanisms in tandem during the performance of a single trick. Such combinations are believed to provide greater protection against the discovery of the overall method, an idea that has been described as the 'veils principle' (Darwin Ortiz, 'Designing Miracles') and in various related ways such as 'connected false assumptions' (Al Schneider, 'The Theory and Practice of Magic Deception'). We examined the efficacy of the veils principle in an experimental study (suggested by a 2016 blogpost on The Jerx) in which spectators were asked to offer explanations for a trick performed by a magician who was able to correctly name the cards of a well shuffled deck as they were dealt down. In one condition, the cards were face-down and the magician wore a blind-fold, requiring spectators to produce a twomechanism explanation of the card-naming in terms of marked cards plus a see-through blindfold. This was compared with two other conditions that each required only a onemechanism explanation of the effect: the cards were face down but there was no blindfold (explained simply by marked cards), and the cards were face up and the magician wore a blindfold (explained simply by a see-through blindfold). We found that about half of our participant spectators readily produced a correct explanation when just one mechanism was deployed: i.e., just marked cards, or just a see-through blindfold. However, spectators were far less likely to produce a correct explanation for the card-naming when both mechanisms were deployed together. One explanation, explored in this talk, is the human tendency to engage in counterfactual reasoning – a phenomenon which has lately emerged as a key concept in the field of Artificial Intelligence, particularly in the contexts of explainable AI and causal inference.
Alice Pailhès (presented by Gustav Kuhn)- Sharing Secrets
‘A magician never reveals their secrets’. Although having secrets is common in everydaylife, the field of magic is particularly surrounded by secrecy, and magicians have gone to great lengths to protect the methods behind their tricks. Magicians are sworn to ethical codes not to reveal the secrets behind their piece of magic. Secrecy and the effects of secret-sharing have only recently started to receive more attention in research. The present study examined how participants evaluate a magician and the art of magic based on the information the magician shares with them. Participants watched a magician perform a vanishing silk trick and then either watched him explaining how the trick was performed (secret-sharing condition) or broader historical information about it (no secretsharing condition). They then had to evaluate (1) the magician/secret-sharer on trustworthiness and closeness, (2) how receiving the information they got changed their perception of magic and magicians and (3) how it changed how likely they were to seek out watching magic in the future. The results showed that sharing the secret method behind the trick led to higher ratings of trustworthiness and closeness relative to sharing other information. Moreover, these participants also reported greater appreciation and interest for the art of magic, and being more likely to seek out magic in the future compared to the other participants who did not got the secret. Mediation analyses showed that all these effects were mediated by how special receiving the information made them feel. I will discuss these results in regard of the recent psychological literature on the effects of secret-sharing as well as of the issue and debate surrounding exposure in the world of magic.
Brian Rappert- Reflections from an autoethnographic study of learning
How can we understand the nature, function, and underlying mechanisms of magic? Among the range of approaches that can inform the Science of Magic, this presentation seeks to understand conjuring as a form of social interaction through research methodologies in the social sciences. More specifically, it relays key findings of a fouryear autoethnographic study I undertook to learn and perform magic. In the tradition of so-called self-studies, I used my immersion into an activity as a novice as a basis for considering how practical reasoning and embodied skills are acquired; in part through relating my first-person experiences to the arguments of seasoned practitioners and the findings of experimental studies. How then can a study starting from a position of ignorance provide insights? This presentation offers three vignettes that address the questions: - How can instructors teach students to recognise what is natural? - How can instructors teach students about the limits of human perception through acts of perception? - How are performances of magic constituted through forms of audience cooperation? Based on these vignettes, the presentation offers a heuristic characterisation of skill in magic. It closes by offering reflections on how this line of study can help reframe attempts to improve magic through marshalling research evidence.
Jacky Baltes- Magic as a Robotics Challenge Problem
This talk introduces the Humanoid Application Challenge Robot Magic (HAC-RM) - a research initiative and competition that uses robot magic as a benchmark problem for research in intelligent robotics and human robot interaction (HRI). The community has held yearly competitions since 2016. I have long been a strong advocate of using robot competitions to guide and evaluate our research progress. My students and I have participated in prestigious robot competitions (e.g., Federation International Robot-sports Association (FIRA) https://www.facebook.com/ groups/firarobot/ or RoboCup http://www.robocup.org) and have won many awards. I am also an active member of the organization of those competitions. One focus of the research is to use robot magic to examine the workings and limitations of attention in human reasoning. Current AI technology focuses on one-shot processing of information, whereas humans pay attention to a subset and use this information to guide further processing. Magicians have entertained crowds for centuries. They seemingly produce rabbits out of a hat, make cards disappear in front of your eyes, read your mind, levitate a flower, and escape from locked coffins. They are masters of misdirection, exploiting biases in human attention, perception, and reasoning. Research into robotics can benefit from better understanding these aspects of human intelligence, since it will not only allow robots to better understand and manipulate their environments, but also to better interact with humans. But robot magic also includes many technical aspects and require abilities that are important robot skills useful in many other applications, e.g., small scale manufacturing, task planning, or speech recognition in noisy environments. In particular, sleight of hand requires fast and dexterous manipulation of small objects such as cards. Some magic tricks also require novel research into advanced computer vision algorithms. For example, a well executed “peek” requires fast object tracking and recognition.