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A Humboldt’s squirrel monkey is fooled by the “French Drop” magic trick. Credit: E. Garcia-Pelegrin et al., 2023 The key to a successful sleight-of-hand magic trick is how well a magician manipulates ...

A team of researchers performed magic tricks for several species of monkey, and they found that the animals’ gullibility may depend on the structure of their hands. Specifically, the team found that ...

This trick required the scientists to put food in one hand, and present that hand to each individual monkey. Clayton (a professor of Comparative Cognition at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow ...

Stephen has degrees in science (Physics major) and arts (English Literature and the History and Philosophy of Science), as well as a Graduate Diploma in Science Communication. Stephen has degrees in ...

An illusion involving a hidden thumb confounds capuchin and squirrel monkeys for the same reason it does humans -- it misdirects expected outcomes of actions they can carry out. However, marmosets ...

Monkeys with hands that resemble ours fall for a sleight-of-hand magic trick, but those without opposable thumbs aren’t fooled. These differences illustrate how primates’ expectations of the actions ...

Psychologists used a sleight-of-hand trick called the French drop, in which an object appears to vanish when a spectator assumes it is taken from one hand by the hidden thumb of the other hand. The ...