Are monkeys deceived by magic tricks designed for humans? It depends whether they have hands like ours
Capuchins are the only New World monkeys that can perform a precision grip by bringing the thumb towards the index or middle finger. Squirrel monkeys have opposable thumbs, but these aren’t freely movable and they can’t grip precisely. Marmosets, meanwhile, lack any semblance of opposable thumbs, as their hands are adapted for climbing thick, vertical tree trunks.
Scientists have teamed up with magicians to perform illusions on Eurasian jays, revealing flaws in their perception – and modes of thinking we didn’t know they had The monkeys were trained to watch Garcia-Pelegrin handling an item of food and select which of his closed fists contained the reward. Then, he showed them the food with one hand and either passed it to the other hand or performed a trick called the French drop by pretending to grab it but keeping it in the same hand.A monthly celebration of the biodiversity of our planet’s animals, plants and other organisms.
Garcia-Pelegrin and his colleagues conclude that since the capuchins and the squirrel monkeys were familiar with the conjurer’s anatomy, they predicted his hand movements and were fooled as a result. “This exemplifies how our internal biases about movements can be sometimes misleading, and we seem to share this with other primates as well,” says Garcia-Pelegrin. “This is what magicians seem to capitalise on by exhibiting these cues but changing the movement’s outcome.
“The most important takeaway from the research is that hand movements are highly critical as social cues. Spectators model other individuals’ hand movements precisely down to the very way that the spectators’ own hands might move in the same circumstance,” says
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