title: The Put-and-Fetch Ambiguity: How Magicians Exploit the Principle of Exclusive Allocation of Movements to Intentions.
abstract: In many magic tricks, magicians fool their audience by performing a mock action (a so-called "ruse"), which merely serves the purpose of providing a seemingly natural explanation for visible movements that are actually part of the secret move they want to hide from the audience. Here, we discuss a special magic ruse in which the action of secretlyputtingsomething somewhere is "explained away" by the mock action offetchingsomething from the same place, orvice versa. Interestingly, the psychological principles underlying the amazing potency and robustness of this technique seem to be very similar to the general perceptual principles underlying figure-ground perception and the assignment of border ownership. This analogy may be useful for exploring the possibility that this and similar magical effects involve immediate "unconscious inferences" about intentions more akin to perceptual processing than to explicit deliberations based on a reflective "theory" of mind.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Sander
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Van de Cruys
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Johan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wagemans
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Vebjørn
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Ekroll
keywords: border ownership; figure–ground; gestalt; magic; principle of exclusive allocation; ruse