In the past 15 years, the scientific investigation of magic has undergone something of a renaissance. Since the year 2000, the body of experimental scientific literature on the topic of performance magic has more than quintupled, relative to all of the experimental work published in preceding years, as far back as the late 1800s. Within the last 15 years 61 empirical papers have been published on the topic. Only 12 such papers were published between 1887 and 1999. The figure illustrates two key points: Firstly, this recent level of focus on the topic is arguably relatively novel, and secondly, the idea of studying the psychology of magic can traced back at least as far as concept of psychology as formal scientific discipline.
In the process of writing my doctoral thesis, I've put together a list of published peer-reviewed articles that have involved empirical laboratory investigations of magic or magicians.
To the best of my knowledge this is a complete list of experiments (please do let me know if you think I've missed one). That being said, this list is limited to experiments and does NOT include reviews, commentaries, theoretical papers, or surveys. Furthermore, the list only includes studies involving adult participants.
Please cite as: Tompkins, M. L. (2016). Science of Magic Bibliography. Retrieved from http://www.matt-tompkins.co/blog/2016/9/23/a-science-of-magic-bibliography
1. Hodgson, R., and S. J. Davy. (1887). The possibilities of mal-observation and lapse of memory from a practical point of view. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 4, 381-495.
2. Jastrow, J. (1896). Psychological notes upon sleight-of-hand experts. Science, 3, 685-689.
3. Triplett, N. (1900). The psychology of conjuring deceptions. The American Journal of Psychology, 11, 439-510.
4. Besterman, T. (1932). The psychology of testimony in relation to paraphysical phenomena: Report of an experiment. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 40, 363-387.
5. Marcuse, F. L., & Bitterman, M. E. (1944). A classroom demonstration of "psychical phenomena." The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 39, 238-243.
6. Benassi, V. A Singer, B., & Reynolds, C.B. (1980). Occult Belief: Seeing is believing, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 19, 337.
7. Jones, W. H. and D. Russell. (1980). The selective processing of belief disconfirming information. European Journal of Social Psychology, 10, 309-312.
8. Trinkaus, J. (1980). Preconditioning an audience for mental magic: An informal look. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 51, 262.
9. Smith, M. D. (1993). The effect of belief in the paranormal and prior set upon the observation of a ‘psychic’ demonstration. European Journal of Parapsychology, 9, 24-34.
10. Wiseman, R., & Morris, R. L. (1995). Recalling pseudo‐psychic demonstrations. British Journal of Psychology, 86, 113-125.
11. Subbotsky, E. (1996). Explaining impossible phenomena: object permanence beliefs and memory failures in adults. Memory, 4, 199-233.
12. Subbotsky, E. (1997). Explanations of unusual events: phenomenalistic causal judgements in children and adults. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15, 13-36.
13. Subbotsky, E. (2001). Causal explanations of events by children and adults: Can alternative causal modes coexist in one mind? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 19, 23-46.
14. Subbotsky, E. & Quinteros, G. (2002). Do cultural factors affect causal beliefs? Rational and magical thinking in Britain and Mexico. British Journal of Psychology, 93, 519-543.
15. Wiseman, R., Greening, E., & Smith, M. (2003). Belief in the paranormal and suggestion in the séance room. British Journal of Psychology, 94, 285-297.
16. Hergovich, A. (2004). The effect of pseudo-psychic demonstrations as dependent on belief in paranormal phenomena and suggestibility. Personality and Individual Differences, 36, 365-380.
17. Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikstrom, S., & Olsson, A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310, 116-119.
18. Kuhn, G. & Tatler, B. W. (2005). Magic and fixation: Now you don't see it, now you do. Perception, 34, 1153-1161.
19. Wiseman, R., & Greening, E. (2005). It's still bending: Verbal suggestion and alleged psychokinetic ability. British Journal of Psychology, 96, 115-127.
20.Kuhn, G. & Land, M. F. (2006). There's more to magic than meets the eye! Current Biology. 16, R950.
21. Linney, Y. M., & Peters, E. R. (2007). The psychological processes underlying symptoms of thought interference in psychosis. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 45, 2726-2741.
22. Kuhn, G. & Tatler, B. W. Findlay J.M. Cole G. G. (2008). Misdirection in magic: Implications for the relationship between eye gaze and attention. Visual Cognition, 16, 391-405.
23. Kuhn, G., Tatler, B. W., & Cole, G. G. (2009). You look where I look! Effect of gaze cues on overt and covert attention in misdirection. Visual cognition, 17(6-7), 925-944.
24. Parris, B. A., Kuhn, G., Mizon, G. A., Benattayallah, A., & Hodgson, T. L. (2009). Imaging the impossible: An fMRI study of impossible causal relationships in magic tricks. Neuroimage, 45, 1033-1039.
25. Hall, L., Johansson, P., Tärning, B., Sikström, S., & Deutgen, T. (2010). Magic at the marketplace: Choice blindness for the taste of jam and the smell of tea. Cognition, 117, 54–61.
26. Kuhn, G. Kourkoulou, A. Leekam, S.R. (2010). How magic changes our expectations about autism. Psychological Science, 21, 1487-93.
27. Kuhn, G., & Findlay, J. M. (2010). Misdirection, attention and awareness: Inattentional blindness reveals temporal relationship between eye movements and visual awareness. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,63, 136-146.
28. Subbotsky, E. (2010). Curiosity and exploratory behavior toward possible and impossible events in children and adults. British Journal of Psychology, 101, 481-501.
29. Cavina-Pratesi, C., Kuhn, G., Ietswaart, M., Milner, A. D. (2011). The Magic Grasp: Motor Expertise in Deception. PLoS ONE, 6, e16568. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0016568
30.Cui, J., Otero-Millan, J., Macknik, S. L., King, M., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2011). Social misdirection fails to enhance a magic illusion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5, 103. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00103
31. Hergovich, A., Gröbl, K., & Carbon, C. C. (2011). The paddle move commonly used in magic tricks as a means for analysing the perceptual limits of combined motion trajectories. Perception 40, 358.
32. Otero-Millan, J., Macknik, S. L., Robbins, A., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2011). Stronger misdirection in curved than in straight motion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00133
33. Demacheva, I., Ladouceur, M., Steinberg, E., Pogossova, G., & Raz, A. (2012). The Applied Cognitive Psychology of Attention: A Step Closer to Understanding Magic Tricks. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26, 541-549.
34. Hall, L., Johansson, P., & Strandberg, T. (2012). Lifting the veil of morality: Choice blindness and attitude reversals on a self-transforming survey. PloS one, 7, e45457. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045457
35. Smith, T. J., Lamont, P., & Henderson, J. M. (2012). The penny drops: Change blindness at fixation. Perception, 41, 489-492.
36. Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., von Müller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2013). Aha! experiences leave a mark: facilitated recall of insight solutions. Psychological Research, 77, 659-669.
37. Hall, L., Strandberg, T., Pärnamets, P., Lind, A., Tärning, B., & Johansson, P. (2013). How the polls can be both spot on and dead wrong: Using choice blindness to shift political attitudes and voter intentions. PloS one, 8, e60554. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060554
38. Johansson, P., Hall, L., Tärning, B., Sikström, S., & Chater, N. (2013). Choice Blindness and Preference Change: You Will Like This Paper Better If You (Believe You) Chose to Read It! Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. doi: 10.1002/bdm.1807
39. Rieiro, H., Martinez-Conde, S., & Macknik, S. L. (2013). Perceptual elements in Penn & Teller’s “Cups and Balls” magic trick. PeerJ, 1, e19. doi: 10.7717/peerj.19
40. Shalom, D. E., de Sousa Serro, M. G., Giaconia, M., Martinez, L. M., Rieznik, A., & Sigman, M. (2013). Choosing in Freedom or Forced to Choose? Introspective Blindness to Psychological Forcing in Stage-Magic. PloS one,8, e58254. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0058254
41. Smith, T. J., Lamont, P., & Henderson, J. M. (2013). Change blindness in a dynamic scene due to endogenous override of exogenous attentional cues. Perception, 42, 884-886.
42. Taylor, H. E., Parker, S., Mansell, W., & Morrison, A. P. (2013). Effects of appraisals of anomalous experience on distress in people at risk of psychosis. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 41(1), 24–33.
43. Ward, T. A., Gaynor, K. J., Hunter, M. D., Woodruff, P. W., Garety, P. A., & Peters, E. R. (2013). Appraisals and responses to experimental symptom analogues in clinical and nonclinical individuals with psychotic experiences. Schizophrenia Bulletin, sbt094.
44. Aardema, F., & Johansson, P. (2014). Choice Blindness, Confabulatory Introspection, and Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms: A New Area of Investigation. International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 7, 83–102.
45. Ali, S. S., Lifshitz, M., & Raz, A. (2014). Empirical neuroenchantment: from reading minds to thinking critically. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 357.
46. Barnhart, A. S., & Goldinger, S. D. (2014). Blinded by magic: Eye-movements reveal the misdirection of attention. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01461.
47. Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., von Müller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2014a). It’s a kind of magic—what self-reports can reveal about the phenomenology of insight problem solving. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1408. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01408
48.Danek, A. H., Fraps, T., Von Mueller, A., Grothe, B., & Öllinger, M. (2014b). Working Wonders? Investigating insight with magic tricks. Cognition, 130, 174-185.
49. Williams, H., & McOwan, P. W. (2014). Magic in the machine: a computational magician's assistant. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01283
50. Wilson, K. & French C. C. (2014) Magic and memory: Using conjuring to explore the effects of suggestion, social influence and paranormal belief on eyewitness testimony for an ostensibly paranormal event. Frontiers in Psychology. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01289
51. Beth, T., & Ekroll, V. (2015). The curious influence of timing on the magical experience evoked by conjuring tricks involving false transfer: decay of amodal object permanence? Psychological Research, 79, 513-522
52. Bouvet, R., & Bonnefon, J. F. (2015). Non-reflective thinkers are predisposed to attribute supernatural causation to uncanny experiences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41, 955-961.
53. Danek, A.H., Öllinger, M., Fraps, T., Grothe, B., & Flanagin, V.L. (2015). An fMRI investigation of expectation violation in magic tricks. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 84.
54. Mohr, C., Koutrakis, N., & Kuhn, G. (2015). Priming psychic and conjuring abilities of a magic demonstration influences event interpretation and random number generation biases. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01542
55. Olson, J., Amlani, A., & Rensink, R. (2015). Using magic to influence choice in the absence of visual awareness. Consciousness and Cognition, 37, 225- 236.
56. Olson, J. A., Demacheva, I., & Raz, A. (2015). Explanations of a magic trick across the life span. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00219
57. Phillips, F., Natter, M. B., & Egan, E. J. (2015). Magically deceptive biological motion—the French Drop sleight. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 371. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00371
58. Smith, T. J. (2015). The role of audience participation and task relevance on change detection during a card trick. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00013
59. Tachibana, R., & Gyoba, J. (2015). Effects of different types of misdirection on attention and detection performance. Took Psychologic Folia, 74, 42-56.
60. Tachibana, R., & Kawabata, H. (2015). The effects of social misdirection on magic tricks: How deceived and undeceived groups differ. i-Perception, 5, 143-146. doi: 10.1068/i0640sas
61. Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2015). No need for a social cue! A masked magician can also trick the audience in the vanishing ball illusion. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 78(1), 21–29. doi:10.3758/s13414-015-1036-9
62. Caffaratti, H., Navajas, J., Rey, H. G., & Quian Quiroga, R. (2016). Where is the ball? behavioral and neural responses elicited by a magic trick. Psychophysiology. 53, 1441-1448.
63. Hedne, M. R., Norman, E., & Metcalfe, J. (2016). Intuitive Feelings of Warmth and Confidence in Insight and Noninsight Problem Solving of Magic Tricks. Frontiers in Psychology, 7.
64. Hergovich, A., & Oberfichtner, B. (2016). Magic and Misdirection: The Influence of Social Cues on the Allocation of Visual Attention While Watching a Cups-and-Balls Routine. Frontiers in Psychology, 761.
65. Kuhn, G., & Rensink, R. A. (2016). The vanishing ball illusion: A new perspective on the perception of dynamic events. Cognition, 148, 64-70.
66. Kuhn, G., Teszka, R., Tenaw, N., & Kingstone, A. (2016). Don’t be fooled! Attentional responses to social cues in a face-to-face and video magic trick reveals greater top-down control for overt than covert attention. Cognition, 146, 136-142.
67. Olson, J. A., Landry, M., Appourchaux, K., & Raz, A. (2016). Simulated thought insertion: Influencing the sense of agency using deception and magic. Consciousness and Cognition, 43, 11-26.
68.Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2016a). The ball vanishes in the air: can we blame representational momentum? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(6), 1810–1817.
69. Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2016b). Magicians fix your mind: How unlikely solutions block obvious ones. Cognition, 154, 169-173.
70. Tompkins, M. L., Woods, A. T., & Aimola Davies, A. M. (2016). Phantom Vanish magic trick: Investigating the disappearance of a non-existent object in a dynamic scene. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 950.
71. Underwood, R., Kumari, V., & Peters, E. (2016). Appraisals of psychotic experiences: An experimental investigation of symptomatic, remitted and non-need-for-care individuals. Psychological Medicine, 46(6), 1249–1263
72. Williams, H., & McOwan, P. W. (2016). Magic in Pieces: An Analysis of Magic Trick Construction Using Artificial Intelligence as a Design Aid. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 30, 16-28.
73. Wiseman, R. J., & Nakano, T. (2016). Blink and you’ll miss it: the role of blinking in the perception of magic tricks. PeerJ, 4, e1873.