Magic for an Animal Audience

Eurasian jay. The Wasp Factory, via Flickr. Distributed under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have begun to investigate how magic effects — tricks such as sleight-of-hand, illusion, and misdirection — exploit quirks of attention and perception in humans. With a new experiment with Eurasian jays, researchers are now expanding their focus to include other species’ reactions to magic tricks. What can the results tell us about how other animals perceive their worlds?

Read the story at my Animal Minds blog: What Can Magic Tricks Reveal About Animal Minds?