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Abstract

When engaging with magic we are moved by seemingly impossible events that contradict our prior knowledge and beliefs. Magic shows us – in the real world – incredible events of, for example, things disappearing, levitating, destroyed and restored, against background knowledge about what we believe possible in the world. We have recently proposed a Bayesian predictive framework of magic, in which the “wow” effect of magic can be thought of as an increase in surprise evoked by the prediction error between deeply held beliefs about the world and incoming sensory information and misdirection as means to
create and maximize this error (Grassi and Bartels, 2021). Building on this predictive coding account, we will make a case for the use of magic stimuli in cognitive neuroscience, how it can be used to investigate the representation of different forms of expectations, surprise and beliefs in the human brain and discuss direct implications of the framework. Finally, we will present empirical data from a recent functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigating the role of prior knowledge and the representation of different forms of prediction error using magic videos focusing on the relationship between behavior and neural representations (Plikat et al., forthcoming).