{"id":5432,"date":"2021-06-01T14:37:22","date_gmt":"2021-06-01T21:37:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=5432"},"modified":"2021-06-03T11:26:20","modified_gmt":"2021-06-03T18:26:20","slug":"magic-tricks-on-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=5432","title":{"rendered":"Magic Tricks on animals"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In a recent paper<\/a>, the similarities between the way jays hide food from those who would steal it and the way magicians deceive the public are striking. Not only do jays and their fellow corvids; \u201cCache food items discreetly in among multiple bluff caching events,\u201d the paper notes, they also; \u201cConceal items in their throat pouch, akin to a magician\u2019s use of false pockets, and will manipulate food items within their beak similar to sleight-of-hand techniques performed by magicians.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Garcia-Pelegrin is a professional magician as well as a cognitive scientist. As the video below shows, he used standard tricks to test Eurasian jays\u2019 capacity to determine which hand held a worm. The jays usually saw through common techniques like the French Drop or the palm transfer, choosing the correct hand 70 and 60 percent of the time respectively. The Fast Pass technique fooled the jays and they got just 26\u00a0percent of trials right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, when showing the same tricks (bird removed from video) to 80 humans, their success ranged between 13 and 27 percent for the three tricks. So, 1 point to the birds, 0 for humans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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