hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
Magic can be a powerful tool for cognitive neuroscientists to investigate human behavior and specific neural mechanisms, such as attention, surprise and violation of expectation. However, albeit magic has enjoyed a growing interest in psychology, it has not been in the focus of cognitive neuroscience and its underlying neural mechanisms are mostly unknown. We want to fill this gap. We designed several magic tricks with a renowned magician (Julius Frack) and want to present them to participants, while measuring their neural activity and eye movements in a functional magnetic resonance imaging setup. For this we will use different magic effects, applied to different objects. We aim to answer the question of which brain regions are activated during perception of magic- vs non-magic videos and whether or not prior knowledge about the tricks affect their neural signiture. Here, we present Eye tracking and psychophysical data collected in a prior validation study. Preliminary analysis of the data show, that knowledge about underlying mechanisms of a magic trick do change how the trick impacts the subject, but not necessarily change their pattern of fixation.
