Hostname: page-component-7f64f4797f-6fdxz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-11-05T11:48:06.106Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

On bodies, brains, and behaviour (and a little bit of magic)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2025

Nathaniel R. Farndale Wright*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Cambridge, UK nrfw2@cam.ac.uk
Nicola S. Clayton
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Cambridge, UK nsc22@cam.ac.uk https://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/ccl
*
*Corresponding author.

Abstract

The impact the body has upon complex cognitive capabilities has long challenged cognitive scientists. Insights into the complex interplay between how we see, what we see, and how we interpret what we think we saw and remembered are offered by a surprising source: the effects magicians create.

Information

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Ahmad, S., Huang, H., & Yu, A. J. (2014). Cost-sensitive Bayesian control policy in human active sensing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 955. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00955 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, L., & Stout, D. (2024). Minds in movement: Embodied cognition in the age of artificial intelligence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 379(1911), 20230144. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0144 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127138. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2787 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garcia-Pelegrin, E., Miller, R., Wilkins, C., & Clayton, N. S. (2023). Manual action expectation and biomechanical ability in three species of New World monkey. Current Biology, 33(9), 18031808. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.03.023 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garcia-Pelegrin, E., Schnell, A. K., Wilkins, C., & Clayton, N. S. (2021). Exploring the perceptual inabilities of Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) using magic effects. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(24), e2026106118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2026106118 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garcia-Pelegrin, E., Schnell, A. K., Wilkins, C., & Clayton, N. S. (2024). Beyond the tricks: The science and comparative cognition of magic. Annual Review of Psychology, 75(1), 269293. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-012723-100945 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garcia-Pelegrin, E., Wilkins, C., & Clayton, N. S. (2022). Investigating expert performance when observing magic effects. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 5141. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-09161-5 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harvey, J. S., & Smithson, H. E. (2021). Low level visual features support robust material perception in the judgement of metallicity. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 16396. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-95416-6 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hebart, M. N., Zheng, C. Y., Pereira, F., & Baker, C. I. (2020). Revealing the multidimensional mental representations of natural objects underlying human similarity judgements. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(11), 11731185. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00951-3 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jelbert, S. A., Miller, R., Schiestl, M., Boeckle, M., Cheke, L. G., Gray, R. D., … Clayton, N. S. (2019). New Caledonian crows infer the weight of objects from observing their movements in a breeze. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 286(1894), 20182332. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.2332 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuhn, G., Amlani, A. A., & Rensink, R. A. (2008). Towards a science of magic. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(9), 349354. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2008.05.008 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lake, B. M., Salakhutdinov, R., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2015). Human-level concept learning through probabilistic program induction. Science, 350(6266), 13321338. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aab3050 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pfeifer, R., Lungarella, M., & Iida, F. (2007). Self-organization, embodiment, and biologically inspired robotics. Science, 318(5853), 10881093. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1145803 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Prescott, T. J., Diamond, M. E., & Wing, A. M. (2011). Active touch sensing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 366(1581), 29892995. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2011.0167 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ranzato, M., Huang, F. J., Boureau, Y.-L., & LeCun, Y. (2007). Unsupervised Learning of Invariant Feature Hierarchies with Applications to Object Recognition. 2007 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1–8. Minneapolis, MN, USA: IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2007.383157 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rensink, R. A., & Kuhn, G. (2015). A framework for using magic to study the mind. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1508. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01508 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stevens, J. (2022). More than a feeling: Tactile exploration informs relative size perception. Perception, 51(9), 672675. https://doi.org/10.1177/03010066221108860 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Summerfield, C., & De Lange, F. P. (2014). Expectation in perceptual decision making: Neural and computational mechanisms. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15(11), 745756. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3838 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wurm, L. H., Legge, G. E., Isenberg, L. M., & Luebker, A. (1993). Color improves object recognition in normal and low vision. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 19(4), 899911. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.19.4.899 Google ScholarPubMed
Yang, G.-Z., Bellingham, J., Dupont, P. E., Fischer, P., Floridi, L., Full, R., … Wood, R. (2018). The grand challenges of science robotics . Science Robotics, 3(14), eaar7650. https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.aar7650 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed