later. If another jay is watching, they may
pretend to stash their food in multiple places
so that the observer doesn’t know where it is –
rather like a magician performing a cups-and-
balls trick. They can even hide items in a throat
pouch, just as magicians use secret pockets.
These acts of deception demonstrate
sophisticated cognitive abilities. Clearly jays
are able to think about other birds’ knowledge
and intentions, a skill that psychologists call
theory of mind. They must also have good
memories to recall the locations of their
caches, and be able to plan for the future.Great expectations
Mental time travel, the ability to remember
the past and anticipate the future is a key part
of how magic tricks fool us, says Nicola Clayton
at the University of Cambridge, who heads
up the lab in which Garcia-Pelegrin works.
“Everyone knows magic is about perception,on our minds: they highlight gaps in our
perception and attention that magicians
exploit to disguise what is in front of our
eyes. But what about other animals – do
they fall for the same tricks we do? Could
their susceptibility to magic tricks highlight
flaws in their perception, or even reveal kinds
of intelligence we didn’t know they had?
“The interesting thing is the comparison
with us,” says Garcia-Pelegrin at the University
of Cambridge. “Once we have the theory of why
a trick works on humans, we can see why it
works, or not, on another species, and that tells
us about their vision system, their attentional
system, their perceptive system and maybe
their metacognitive systems. A lot of magic
capitalises on you thinking about thinking.”
Eurasian jays are a fascinating choice for this
research because they are very different from
humans yet are capable of feats resembling
magic tricks. Like crows and other members
of the corvid family, they hide food to retrieveI
N HIS right hand, Elias Garcia-Pelegrin
holds a worm. He pretends to grab it with
his left but, while his fingers obscure it, he
lets it drop back into the right – a classic sleight
of hand called the French drop. Garcia-Pelegrin,
who began performing magic when he was a
student, has fooled countless people with this
trick. But today’s audience isn’t buying it: Stuka
the Eurasian jay moves her beak towards his
right hand, which he opens to give her the treat.
Comparative psychologists have often
employed deception to explore how animals
think. For example, they have used boxes
with false bottoms to switch one type of food
for another, studying the reactions of dogs
and apes to understand how they form
mental representations of hidden objects.
But the French drop experiment is something
new. It is part of the first study to explicitly
compare how animals and people react to
magic tricks designed to fool humans.
EM Such illusions offer a fascinating window >
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18/25 December 2021 | New Scientist | 63