People's perceptions of magic tricks and why they are effective are often in direct contrast to how magicians feel their performances are being received by their audiences, new research has suggested.

A debate has raged amongst magicians for a half-century, centered around the "Too Perfect Theory". Magician Rick Johnsson proposed the idea in 1970, stating that if a trick is too perfect – seemingly ...

Psychologists used a sleight-of-hand trick called the French drop, in which an object appears to vanish when a spectator assumes it is taken from one hand by the hidden thumb of the other hand. The ...

This trick required the scientists to put food in one hand, and present that hand to each individual monkey. Clayton (a professor of Comparative Cognition at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow ...