To trick an audience, magicians often misdirect social cues, drawing attention toward one action and away from another. People with autism, a neural development disorder, have impaired social interactions. Therefore, one would assume that they would be less susceptible to a magician’s social manipulation than people without autism. However, a new study published in Psychological Science shows that children with autism spectrum disorder may actually be more likely to be fooled by a magic trick than children without autism.
As people with autism have trouble interpreting social cues, Gustav Kuhn of Brunel University and his colleagues wanted to compare how teenagers with and without autism spectrum disorder react to the vanishing-ball illusion. In this magic trick, a magician throws a ball in the air a few times and on the last throw, only pretends to throw the ball (making a tossing motion and looking upward), while the ball remains concealed in his hand (see SciVee pubcast below).
In this experiment, 15 teenagers and young adults with autism spectrum disorder and 16 without autism watched a video of a magician performing the vanishing-ball illusion. They were then asked to draw (on a still image of the magician) where they had last seen the ball.
“We strongly suspected that individuals with autism would be using social cues less than typically developing individuals,” says Kuhn. The researchers expected that people with autism would watch the ball rather than the magician’s face, and therefore have a better idea of what was happening.
However, the results were the exact opposite. People with autism were much more likely to think the magician had thrown the ball. When Kuhn examined where they had looked, he found that like typically-developing individuals, people with autism looked first at the magician’s face – but their eyes took a longer amount of time to fixate there. They also had more trouble fixing their eyes on the ball.
“What we suggest is that individuals with autism have particular problems in allocating attention to the right place at the right time,” Kuhn says. This may cause trouble in social situations, when one has to pay attention to the right thing at the right time. Kuhn would like to repeat the experiment with autistic children, who may not yet have been educated in social cues, to see if children are also taken in by the illusion.
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Kuhn, G., Kourkoulou, A., & Leekam, S.R. (2010). How magic changes our expectations about autism. Psychological science, 21. doi: 10.1177/0956797610383435