IN HIS right hand, . He pretends to grab it with his left but, while his fingers obscure it, he lets it drop back into the right – a classic sleight of hand called the French drop. Garcia-Pelegrin, who began performing magic when he was a student, has fooled countless people with this trick. But today’s audience isn’t buying it: Stuka the Eurasian jay moves her beak towards his right hand, which he opens to give her the treat.
Comparative psychologists have often employed deception to explore how animals think. For example, they have used , studying the reactions of dogs and apes to understand how they form mental representations of hidden objects. But the French drop experiment is something new. It is part of the .
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Such illusions offer a fascinating window on our minds: they highlight gaps in our perception and attention that magicians exploit to disguise what is in front of our eyes. But what about other animals – do they fall for the same tricks we do? Could their susceptibility to magic tricks highlight flaws in their perception, or even reveal kinds of intelligence we didn’t know they had?
“The interesting thing is the comparison with us,” says Garcia-Pelegrin at the University of Cambridge. “Once we have the theory of why a trick works on humans, we can see why it works, or not, on another species, and that tells us about their vision system, their attentional system, their perceptive system and maybe their metacognitive systems. A lot of magic capitalises on you thinking about thinking.”
Eurasian jays are a fascinating choice for this research because they are very different from humans yet are capable of feats resembling magic tricks. Like crows and other members of the corvid family, they hide food to retrieve later. If another jay is watching, they may pretend to stash their food in multiple places so that the observer doesn’t know where it is – rather like a magician performing a cups-and-balls trick. They can even hide items in a throat pouch, just as magicians use secret pockets.
These acts of deception demonstrate sophisticated cognitive abilities. Clearly jays are able to think about other birds’ knowledge and intentions, a skill that psychologists call theory of mind. They must also have good memories to recall the locations of their caches, and be able to plan for the future.
Great expectations
Mental time travel, the ability to remember the past and anticipate the future is a key part of how magic tricks fool us, says , who heads up the lab in which Garcia-Pelegrin works. “Everyone knows magic is about perception, but what’s more interesting is what it reveals about memory and mental time travel,” she says. “If you don’t remember and don’t have a subjective experience of remembering so that you question your memory, then magic effects wouldn’t work. That’s our thesis.”
But if Stuka is capable of mental time travel, why wasn’t she fooled by the French drop? When humans watch the trick, we assume that the left hand is grasping the worm. But jays lack opposable thumbs, so they don’t have the same expectations we have about how hands operate. “I expected jays not to be fooled by the French drop because they don’t have hands,” says Garcia-Pelegrin. The way that birds reacted to another of his tricks was more surprising.
This time, Garcia-Pelegrin held the worm in his right hand, then quickly tossed it into his left before closing both hands. The motion was too fast for a human to see, but what about Stuka? She leaned towards the magician’s right hand again, only to discover that it was empty. “I did not expect jays to be fooled by the fast pass,” says Garcia-Pelegrin. “Our vision system is not adapted to rapid movements, but birds are experts at seeing fast.”
He suspects jays are duped for another reason. Birds can choose to pay attention to information from one eye or both, but preferentially use one because that gives them better resolution. It may be that when they see the fast hand movement, they switch from monocular to binocular vision and miss the worm’s transfer during the change. “We hypothesise that rather than a perceptive blind spot, it’s an attentional blind spot,” says Garcia-Pelegrin.
Clayton, who is a leading authority on corvid intelligence, became interested in what magic can tell us about animal minds when she began collaborating with Clive Wilkins, an artist and magician who is also her tango partner. “Magic is really good at showing us the roadblocks in our thinking, the ways in which we’re short-sighted,” says Wilkins. “One of the ways is that we anticipate what the future is going to be before it has arrived. Magicians know this. They begin a movement, and while people are in a revelry of thinking they understand what will happen, they use that blind spot to do something completely different.”
“Magic is really good at showing us the roadblocks in our thinking”
To see if jays have a similar cognitive roadblock, Clayton’s group used a version of the cups-and-balls trick. Under the cups, there are either peanuts – a second-rate snack – or the birds’ favourite treats, cheese or worms. If they lift a cup to find cheese or worms when they are expecting peanuts, they are pleasantly surprised. If they expect worms and discover peanuts, they throw the cup across the room seemingly in a tantrum.
These reactions demonstrate a knack for mental time travel, says Clayton. “The jays have a memory of what they think happens, then something else unfolds that reveals it didn’t happen in the way they thought and that’s why it’s surprising. It’s about questioning reality.” Such abilities have been seen in only a few other bird species and apes, but, perhaps surprisingly, some invertebrates show impressive future planning skills too. Research published last year reveals that if cuttlefish know they will get their favourite food (shrimp) at dinner time, they will .
Clayton’s team plans to follow these jay studies by testing sleight-of-hand tricks on other animals. Will monkeys with opposable thumbs be more easily fooled by the French drop? Will raptors with forward-facing vision pick up on a fast pass between hands?
Falling for magic tricks is one thing, but do they also amaze and amuse animals as they do us? Some videos posted online suggest they do: in one, an orangutan literally . And Clayton thinks that other great apes could be entertained by magic provided the trick doesn’t leave them feeling they have been cheated.
But Garcia-Pelegrin isn’t so sure. “Think of magic as a social contract. You allow me to make a fool of you for your own benefit. That, in itself, requires a lot of theory of mind,” he says. Besides, apes usually don’t respond well when their expectations are violated. But he would love to be proved wrong. “If someone can show me that an orangutan is having a great time while seeing magic and show it scientifically, I’ll be the happiest man on Earth.”
