Autistic people 'more likely to be taken in by magic tricks, illusions'

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Autistic people 'more likely to be taken in by magic tricks, illusions'

2010-10-21 05:30:00

A new study has revealed that people with autism spectrum disorder are actually

more likely to be taken in by the vanishing ball trick, where a magician

pretends to throw a ball in the air but actually hides it in his hand.

In the trick, the magician looks up while the ball remains concealed in his

hand. But observers claim to " see " the ball leaving the hand. This misdirection

depends on social cues; the audience watches the magician's face.

People with autism are known for having trouble interpreting social cues, so

Gustav Kuhn of Brunel University and his coauthors Anastasia Kourkoulou and

R. Leekam of Cardiff University thought they could use magic tricks to

understand how people with autism function.

For this experiment, 15 teenagers and young adults with autism spectrum disorder

and 16 without autism watched the trick. Then they were asked to mark where they

last saw the ball on a still image of the magician.

The team found that people with autism were much more likely to think the

magician had thrown the ball. They also found that, like normally developing

people, they looked first at the magician's face-but their eyes took longer to

fix there.

They also had more trouble fixing their eyes on the ball.

" What we suggest is that individuals with autism have particular problems in

allocating attention to the right place at the right time, " Kuhn said.

Kuhn would like to repeat the experiment in children with autism, who may not

yet have been educated in social cues, to see if they are also taken in by the

illusion.

The results are published in Psychological Science. (ANI)

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