The Birds Were Not Fooled
You can impress family members and friends with magic tricks, but you can also use them to study the differences in perception between animals and humans – and a new study highlights how Eurasian jays aren't quite as susceptible to sleight of hand as we are.
Jays and other large-brained birds often use techniques similar to sleight of hand to keep food concealed in their beaks and away from potential scavengers, which adds another level of intrigue when it comes to how they react to magic performed by a person. "A magic trick works because it violates your expectations," psychologist Elias Garcia-Pelegrin, from the University of Cambridge in the UK, told The Academic Times. "As such, it is quite interesting to use these magic effects to check if the expectations of other minds are like ours."
A series of tests involving both birds and people showed that the jays were less easily fooled than people by sleight of hand techniques that involved expected motion rather than actual motion – a sign that they don't anticipate actions such as grabbing in the same way that we do.
