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People find magical transformations more interesting when they move towards animacy and intelligence, revealing cognitive biases. This suggests our intuitions about magic tricks reflect deeper ontological commitments.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Philosophy of Mind
  • Psychology

Background:

  • Human perception of transformations exhibits systematic asymmetries.
  • The appeal of magic tricks often relates to their violation of intuitive physical expectations.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the systematic asymmetries in the appeal of magical transformations.
  • To explore the relationship between these asymmetries and ontological hierarchies.
  • To examine how judgments of interestingness and plausibility differ for transformations and machines.

Main Methods:

  • An experiment where participants rated the interestingness of various magic tricks.
  • Two further experiments assessing judgments of plausibility and interestingness for machines performing similar transformations.
  • Formal analysis linking interestingness to evidence for alternative physical theories.

Main Results:

  • Transformations increasing animacy and intelligence were consistently rated as more interesting than those decreasing them.
  • Judgments of machine plausibility did not mirror these asymmetries, but interestingness judgments did.
  • The sense of interestingness in magic tricks correlates with evidence for alternative physical theories.

Conclusions:

  • Intuitions about magic tricks reveal underlying ontological commitments in human cognition.
  • The directionality of transformations in ontological hierarchies influences perceived interestingness.
  • Magic tricks serve as a unique source of evidence for cognitive biases and theoretical commitments.