Magic! The concepts of embodied cognition and expectations are important to successful magic tricks. But magic is also being used in animal cognition studies to help us understand how these other minds perceive their world.
This article is a delightful read. Dive in and find out why the classic 'French drop' magic trick fooled some monkeys but no others!
". . . these experiments reveal something interesting about embodied cognition, the idea that the body, and how it interacts with the environment, is an important aspect of how minds work. The brain isn’t alone in a vacuum making sense of what it sees, she says. “It’s about how the whole body interprets the movements.”
"Though performing magic for animals in the name of science is a relatively new idea, methods akin to magic effects have been used for decades. One type of experiment, borrowed from psychology studies with human infants, reveals what animals understand about the world by seeing if they’re surprised by the impossible.
"Babies stare longer at something that surprises them, and scientists think the same is true for many animals. Based on staring times, scientists have learned that orangutans are bewildered when a grape goes into a container but a piece of carrot comes out, dogs are perplexed if a bone magically disappears, and crows think it’s strange if a tool moves on its own."
Read it here: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2024/how-magic-can-help-us-understand-animal-minds