The current research borrows a technique from magic to explore the relationship between microsaccades and covert attention under near-natural viewing conditions. The methods of magicians provide powerful tools for enhancing the ecological validity of laboratory studies of attention. Overall, the evidence presented in this thesis further reinforces the power and insight that using magic effects in psychology can apport in reference to the innerworkings and evolution of the human and the non-human mind.

Finally, Chapter 8 summarises the findings of this thesis and discusses the implications for the evolution of these nuances. Alongside this, all species tested experienced the effect capitalising on fast motions similarly to each other regardless of their significant differences in their visual system, thus suggesting a convergently evolved blind spot or a product of common decent. Both chapters provide evidence that anatomical ability and experience performing an action moderate how the pantomime movement of this action will be perceived. Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 provide comparisons of how diverse species with dissimilar anatomies and visual systems experience methodologically distinct sleight of hand effects. Eurasian jays are sensitive to similar illusions that humans are, and this sensitivity is moderated by different nuances such as the type of effect (i.e., either negative or positive), or the social status of the avian observer. Chapter 5 takes inspiration from a well-known magic effect and uses it to investigate how Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) experience illusions. As a first step towards creating a Comparative Science of Magic, Chapter 4 reviews the similarities and differences in how both human and non-human audiences experience magic effects, evaluates the evolution of the craft by reviewing the deception tactics of non-human animals, and offers insight into the use of magic effects in the lab by reviewing potential candidates for such an endeavour. Chapter 3 shows how the order in which magic effects are presented within a routine moderate how the human audience will perceive the skill of the magician performing it. In Chapter 2, I demonstrate how experience deceiving others using similar techniques moderate the expectations necessary to be misled by these effects, as expert magicians do not display the same biases when observing sleight of hand effects than typical observers. After introducing the Science of Magic and proposing magic as a tool to investigate cognition in non-human animals in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 explore how multifaceted is the human experience of magic effects. In this thesis I explore how humans and non-human animals experience these techniques, and some of the nuances moderating this experience.

The use of magic effects in comparative cognition provides a powerful tool to investigate how diverse species perceive the world around them, by focusing on their shared psychological constraints rather than their cognitive prowess. Understanding magic within Bayesian predictive coding allows unifying all aspects of magic tricks within one framework, making it tractable, comparable and unifiable with other models in psychology and neuroscience. The role of misdirection is described as everything that aims to maximize the surprise a trick evokes by the generation of novel beliefs, the exploitation of background knowledge and attentional control of the incoming information. We take into account prior knowledge of the observer, attention, and (mis-)direction of perception and beliefs by the magician to bias the observer’s predictions and present a simple example for the modelling of the evoked surprise. We present the “wow” effect of magic as an increase in surprise evoked by the prediction error between expected and observed data. Here, we present an account of magic within the theory of Bayesian predictive coding. However, most research in magic focused on isolated aspects of it and a conceptual understanding of magic, encompassing its distinct components and varieties, is missing. Magic tricks have enjoyed an increasing interest by scientists.

Scientific magic trick