Autism and Magic

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A new study by Gustav Kuhn, Anastasia Kourkoulou, and Susan R. Leekam offers surprising results about people with autism and sleight of hand: we seem to be easier for magicians to fool than neurotypical people are. Since magicians rely on misleading visual cues to direct an audience's attention, it would make sense that people on the spectrum, who tend not to see social cues, might be less likely to be fooled by those cues. And yet that appears not to be the case.

SviVee offers a cool option in which in you can simultaneously watch Kuhn's video about the experiment while relevant sections, including both text and pictures, from the paper are highlighted. Some people might find it too much to process at once, especially considering the results of the experiment, but I thought it was a good use of Web technology to explain something efficiently and effectively.

http://www.scivee.tv/node/25133

In the experiment, participants watch a video in which a magician makes a ball disappear by throwing it a couple of tims, then pretending to throw it while actually hiding it in his palm. The hypotheses was that autistic people would be harder to fool, because previous experiments showed that the trick was most effective when the magician pretended to look where the imaginary "thrown" ball would be, and because eye-tracking data indicated that people looked more at the magician's face than they did at the ball. Autistic people frequently have difficulty looking at faces and often seem more interested in objects than in people, so this was logical.

However, people with autism were more likely than neurotypical people to think they had seen a ball when none was there. Moreover, they spent just as much time looking at the magician's face as NT people, but were much slower to do so. They were also less likely to actually spot the ball during the times when the magician did actually throw it.

The ultimate conclusion that Kuhn et. al. draw here seems absolutely correct: that people with autism have difficulty allocating attention effectively in complex situations. In other words, when there are multiple places we need to look at almost the same time, we are more likely than NT people to be confused.

What bothers me here is the suggestion that this experiment reveals very much about how we process social cues. I do not think looking at a ball is a social cue-- it's a visual cue. It has nothing to do with relationships between people, and those are the sorts of social cues that people with autism have difficulty with. I can tell where people are looking; I can't always tell how they feel about what they are looking at.

I also think the use of video makes it a bad idea to use this study to draw conclusions about people with autism and social cues. I can tell what people on TV are feeling much more easily than I can what people in real life are doing. I think this is in part because I can look at them however I want, without making them uncomfortable or angry. I wonder if the results would be similar if the participants were observing in real life rather than on video. Even if they were, I'm not sure that would really say anything about social cues. A magician is a performer, so looking directly at his face is less threatening than looking at someone I am talking with would be.

I really disagree. Unless I didn't pick up that 'symptom' of autism (not all of us have every symptom). I've always been really, really good at seeing what everyone else doesn't see, especially those slight of hand tricks. It's the more obvious that I always overlook.

Magic tricks were one of my special interests in high school and I got pretty good at doing sleight-of-hand tricks

Very interesting, Vector. The one thing we are taking away from my son's treatment with RDI (which we are now discontinuing) is the view that autism is about difficulty allocating and organizing brain resources; it makes sense to me.

I have a friend who is a slight-of-hand magician - I've worked in the "variety arts," myself and have a bit of an in. I may or may not have features of autism, but I spent one afternoon watching him do a trick involving misdirection - and with full knowledge of what he was doing and how he was doing it, was unable to resist the misdirection. It was fascinating to helplessly feel my eyes follow the directing hand.

While I agree with you that magic doesn't necessarily involve social communication, it does take advantage of human social cues: some misdirection involves eye contact and the ability of one person to draw the eye of another (frequently magicians misdirect by getting someone to follow their gaze - it would make sense that autistics wouldn't be fooled by that, particularly those who don't make eye contact at all.) This is a good article about the types of techniques that theoretically might not work on autistics: http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/949/2 ... ntion.html

However, there are other methods of misdirection that are common, and take advantage of more lizard-brain visual tendencies: most notably, the tendency to look at movement. From my experience with myself and my son, this is something we are hyper-sensitive to; I would guess that autistics are more likely to be "fooled" by this kind of misdirection than the average person. It is important to note that both the head and eyes of the magician are MOVING, and are much larger than the ball. Essentially, I agree with you - but I think it has less to do with the ball, and more to do with movement. This article has a lot of information about both: http://www.leirpoll.com/choreographic_misdirection.htm

I think the study over-focuses and misinterprets that the participants with autism were tracking the head/eye movement of the magician without accounting for whether or not autistics may follow eye and head movement even if they don't usually meet someone's gaze.

I wonder if the results would have been the same if they conducted the experiment face-to-face with the magician rather than by having the autists watch a video.

I know I personally look at faces more often in videos than in person, for whatever reason.

It's true though, I'd find it very uninteresting to watch someone throwing a ball around, so I'd probably be unlikely to pay enough attention to really tell what he was doing, but that may not necessarily apply to a situation in which paying attention had personal significance and was very important. I don't know if the results may have been skewed by stuff like that.

I am often very weary of the way people interpret statistics to mean whatever they want them to, while leaving out important details which may tell a different story. Something like a total lack of interest in watching a video of a man throwing a ball, doesn't automatically equate to someone being easily tricked.

I'd call that interpretation "sleight of thought" and I find NTs are all too readily tricked by it, every time. As far as they're concerned, if a scientist says something, it must be true, no questions asked. Things like reasoning or coherent logic rarely come into it.

I think auties would be easier to fool through divertive (is that a word?) actions. All the conjurer would have to do is make a distracting movement in one space and do their switcheroo or whatever in another, and we wouldn't follow either effectively, unless we were specifically looking for it.

While I watched the trick, I simply watched his hand the entire time. Who wants to look up and down that fast?

Anyway, how precise is their eye-tracking software? Precise enough to know that I spent large parts of that video watching his nose and glasses and teeth? Precise enough to know I couldn't actually see his eyes?

If aspies do allocate RAM memory to many other aspects of whats actually going on, and see a bigger picture, it only makes sense that the supposedly important details are missed due to many processes running in the background.

In favour of obscure details and observations that hold little value to NT.

Like an absent minded professor who has concentration in the nether regions

How do I upgrade my physical RAM to 8GB?