Profiles
Dr Gustav Kuhn
Associate Professor in Psychology
School of Psychology (Faculty of Health)
Biography
Biography
1996 – 1999 BSc in Psychology – Sussex University
2000 – 2003 DPhil in Psychology – Sussex University
2004 – 2005 Visiting fellow, Queens University
2005 – 2006 Postdoctoral Research Associate, Durham University
2006 – 2009 Wolfson Research Fellow
2009 – 2011 Lecturer, Brunel University
2011 – 2023 Senior Lecturer/Reader, Goldsmiths, University of London
2023 - Associate Professor, University of Plymouth, 2023
Professional membership
Teaching
Teaching
Teaching interests
PSYC604 - The Misdirected Mind
Research
Research
Research interests
The MAGIC lab applies an interdisciplinary approach to studying human behaviour and cognition. Our efforts include, but are not limited to using magic to study a wide range of psychological questions, around consciousness, attention, perception, magical beliefs, deception, free will… We strongly encourage an interdisciplinary approach that allows us to bridge the gap between the real world knowledge acquired by magicians and the sciences (Psychology, Neuroscience, Computer Science…). We use a wide range of experimental methodologies, such as behavioural and neurophysiology measure, eye tracking, and natural observation to study behaviour and cognition in laboratory and real-world settings.
Publications
Publications
Key publications
Key publications are highlighted
Journals
Articles
(2023) 'Experiencing the improbable: How does the objective probability of a magic trick occurring influence a spectator’s experience?' Decision , DOI Open access
(2023) 'A balanced view of impossible aesthetics: An empirical investigation of how impossibility relates to our enjoyment of magic tricks' i-Perception 14, (1) 204166952211425-204166952211425 Publisher Site , DOI
(2022) 'Experiencing misinformation: The effect of pre-exposure warnings and debunking on psychic beliefs' Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 76, (6) 1445-1456 Publisher Site , DOI
(2022) 'Mastering the impossible: Piloting an easier-than-expected magic intervention that acts as a source of self-efficacy' Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 9, (3) 243-256 Publisher Site , DOI
(2022) 'Supporting the psychological health of our students: An arts-based community magic workshop for adapting to university life' Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 9, (3) 285-303 Publisher Site , DOI
(2022) 'Too perfect to be good? An investigation of magicians’ Too Perfect Theory' PeerJ 10, , DOI Open access
(2022) 'Misdirection – Magic, Psychology and its Application' Science & Technology Studies 35, (2) 13-29 Publisher Site , DOI
(2022) 'Misdirection in Global Health' Science & Technology Studies 35, (2) 2-12 Publisher Site , DOI
(2021) 'Differential Effects of Experience and Information Cues on Metacognitive Judgments About Others’ Change Detection Abilities' i-Perception 12, (4) 204166952110392-204166952110392 Publisher Site , DOI
(2021) 'Mind Control Tricks: Magicians’ Forcing and Free Will' Trends in Cognitive Sciences 25, (5) 338-341 Publisher Site , DOI
(2021) 'Reply to Cole: Magic and deception—do magicians mislead science?' Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, (3) Publisher Site , DOI
(2020) 'The magician’s choice: Providing illusory choice and sense of agency with the equivoque forcing technique' Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 150, (7) 1358-1372 Publisher Site , DOI
(2020) 'A psychologically based taxonomy of Magicians’ forcing Techniques: How magicians influence our choices, and how to use this to study psychological mechanisms' Consciousness and Cognition 86, 103038-103038 Publisher Site , DOI
(2020) 'Talking to the Dead in the Classroom: How a Supposedly Psychic Event Impacts Beliefs and Feelings' Psychological Reports 124, (6) 2427-2452 Publisher Site , DOI
(2020) 'Nothing else matters: Video games create sustained attentional selection away from task-irrelevant features' Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 82, (8) 3907-3919 Publisher Site , DOI
(2020) 'Influencing choices with conversational primes: How a magic trick unconsciously influences card choices' Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, (30) 17675-17679 Publisher Site , DOI
(2020) 'The apparent action causation: Using a magician forcing technique to investigate our illusory sense of agency over the outcome of our choices' Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 73, (11) 1784-1795 Publisher Site , DOI
(2020) 'Subtly encouraging more deliberate decisions: using a forcing technique and population stereotype to investigate free will' Psychological Research 85, (4) 1380-1390 , DOI Open access
(2020) 'Forcing you to experience wonder: Unconsciously biasing people’s choice through strategic physical positioning' Consciousness and Cognition 80, 102902-102902 Publisher Site , DOI
(2020) 'Magic on the Menu: Where Are All the Magical Food and Beverage Experiences?' Foods 9, (3) 257-257 Publisher Site , DOI
(2019) 'Are Women Perceived as Worse Magicians Than Men? Gender Bias When Evaluating Magic Tricks' Social Psychological Bulletin 14, (3) Publisher Site , DOI
(2019) 'The crossroads of magic and wellbeing: A review of wellbeing-focused magic programs, empirical studies, and conceivable theories' International Journal of Wellbeing 9, (2) 41-65 Publisher Site , DOI
(2019) 'Studying “natural” eye movements in an “unnatural” social environment: The influence of social activity, framing, and sub-clinical traits on gaze aversion' Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 72, (8) 1913-1925 Publisher Site , DOI
(2018) 'Fake science: The impact of pseudo-psychological demonstrations on people’s beliefs in psychological principles' PLOS ONE 13, (11) e0207629-e0207629 Publisher Site , DOI
(2018) 'Magic Performances – When Explained in Psychic Terms by University Students' Frontiers in Psychology 9, Publisher Site , DOI
(2018) 'Why are you looking at me? It’s because I’m talking, but mostly because I’m staring or not doing much' Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 81, (1) 109-118 Publisher Site , DOI
(2018) 'Magical Potential: Why Magic Performances Should be Used to Explore the Psychological Factors Contributing to Human Belief Formation' Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 53, (1) 126-137 Publisher Site , DOI
(2018) 'Exploiting failures in metacognition through magic: Visual awareness as a source of visual metacognition bias' Consciousness and Cognition 65, 152-168 Publisher Site , DOI
(2018) 'Mental states modulate gaze following, but not automatically' Cognition 180, 1-9 Publisher Site , DOI
(2018) 'The Flushtration Count Illusion: Attribute substitution tricks our interpretation of a simple visual event sequence' British Journal of Psychology 109, (4) 850-861 Publisher Site , DOI
(2018) 'It is magic! How impossible solutions prevent the discovery of obvious ones?' Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 71, (12) 2481-2487 Publisher Site , DOI
(2018) 'Own-age biases in adults’ and children’s joint attention: Biased face prioritization, but not gaze following!' Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 71, (2) 372-379 Publisher Site , DOI
(2018) 'The magic hand: Plasticity of mental hand representation' Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 71, (11) 2314-2324 Publisher Site , DOI
(2017) 'How Has the Emergence of Digital Culture Affected Professional Magic?' Professions and Professionalism 7, (3) e1957-e1957 Publisher Site , DOI
(2017) 'Don't Get Misdirected! Differences in Overt and Covert Attentional Inhibition between Children and Adults' Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 17470218.2016.1-17470218.2016.1 Publisher Site , DOI
(2016) 'Exercise-Induced Fatigue and Caffeine Supplementation Affect Psychomotor Performance but Not Covert Visuo-Spatial Attention' PLOS ONE 11, (10) e0165318-e0165318 Publisher Site , DOI
(2016) 'Oculomotor atypicalities in Developmental Coordination Disorder' Developmental Science 21, (1) Publisher Site , DOI
(2016) 'Editorial: The Psychology of Magic and the Magic of Psychology' Frontiers in Psychology 7, Publisher Site , DOI
(2016) 'Fatigue related impairments in oculomotor control are prevented by caffeine' Scientific Reports 6, (1) Publisher Site , DOI
(2016) 'Real Person Interaction in Visual Attention Research' European Psychologist 21, (2) 141-149 Publisher Site , DOI
(2015) 'The Vanishing Ball Illusion: A new perspective on the perception of dynamic events' Cognition 148, 64-70 Publisher Site , DOI
(2015) 'Self-construal priming selectively modulates the scope of visual attention' Frontiers in Psychology 6, Publisher Site , DOI
(2015) 'Don’t be fooled! Attentional responses to social cues in a face-to-face and video magic trick reveals greater top-down control for overt than covert attention' Cognition 146, 136-142 Publisher Site , DOI
(2015) 'A framework for using magic to study the mind' Frontiers in Psychology 5, Publisher Site , DOI
(2015) 'Priming psychic and conjuring abilities of a magic demonstration influences event interpretation and random number generation biases' Frontiers in Psychology 5, Publisher Site , DOI
(2014) 'Expertise among professional magicians: an interview study' Frontiers in Psychology 5, Publisher Site , DOI
(2014) 'A psychologically-based taxonomy of misdirection' Frontiers in Psychology 5, Publisher Site , DOI
(2014) 'Age-related decline in the reflexive component of overt gaze following' Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 68, (6) 1073-1081 Publisher Site , DOI
(2014) 'Telling people where to look in a soccer-based decision task: A nomothetic approach' JOURNAL OF EYE MOVEMENT RESEARCH 7, (2)
(2013) 'Eye Movement Difficulties in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Implications for Implicit Contextual Learning' Autism Research 6, (3) 177-189 Publisher Site , DOI
(2013) 'Personal Social Networks and the Cultivation of Expertise in Magic: An Interview Study' Vocations and Learning 6, (3) 347-365 Publisher Site , DOI
(2012) 'Misdirection – Past, Present, and the Future' Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5, Publisher Site , DOI
(2012) 'Visual cognition during real social interaction' Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6, Publisher Site , DOI
(2011) 'Developmental Changes in the Control of Saccadic Eye Movements in Response to Directional Eye Gaze and Arrows' Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 64, (10) 1919-1929 Publisher Site , DOI
(2011) 'Non-transient luminance changes do not capture attention' Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 73, (5) 1407-1421 Publisher Site , DOI
(2011) 'Potential social interactions are important to social attention' Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, (14) 5548-5553 Publisher Site , DOI
(2011) 'The Magic Grasp: Motor Expertise in Deception' PLoS ONE 6, (2) e16568-e16568 Publisher Site , DOI
(2010) 'Increased gaze following for fearful faces. It depends on what you’re looking for!' Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 18, (1) 89-95 Publisher Site , DOI
(2010) 'Misdirected by the gap: The relationship between inattentional blindness and attentional misdirection' Consciousness and Cognition 20, (2) 432-436 Publisher Site , DOI
(2010) 'How Magic Changes Our Expectations About Autism' Psychological Science 21, (10) 1487-1493 Publisher Site , DOI
(2010) 'What the experimenter's prime tells the observer's brain' Attention, Perception & Psychophysics 72, (5) 1367-1376 Publisher Site , DOI
(2009) 'Eye movements affirm: automatic overt gaze and arrow cueing for typical adults and adults with autism spectrum disorder' Experimental Brain Research 201, (2) 155-165 Publisher Site , DOI
(2009) 'You look where I look! Effect of gaze cues on overt and covert attention in misdirection' Visual Cognition 17, (6-7) 925-944 Publisher Site , DOI
(2009) 'Appearance matters: Attentional orienting by new objects in the precueing paradigm' Visual Cognition 17, (5) 755-776 Publisher Site , DOI
(2009) 'Misdirection, attention and awareness: Inattentional blindness reveals temporal relationship between eye movements and visual awareness' Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 63, (1) 136-146 Publisher Site , DOI
(2009) 'Attentional capture by object appearance and disappearance' Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 63, (1) 147-159 Publisher Site , DOI
(2009) 'Look away! Eyes and arrows engage oculomotor responses automatically' Attention, Perception & Psychophysics 71, (2) 314-327 Publisher Site , DOI
(2009) 'The Prioritization of Feature Singletons in the Change Detection Paradigm' Experimental Psychology 56, (2) 134-146 Publisher Site , DOI
(2008) 'Imaging the impossible: An fMRI study of impossible causal relationships in magic tricks' NeuroImage 45, (3) 1033-1039 Publisher Site , DOI
(2008) 'Towards a science of magic' Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12, (9) 349-354 Publisher Site , DOI
(2008) 'Misdirection in magic: Implications for the relationship between eye gaze and attention' Visual Cognition 16, (2-3) 391-405 Publisher Site , DOI
(2007) 'Onset of illusory figures attenuates change blindness' Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 14, (5) 939-943 Publisher Site , DOI
(2007) 'The influence of eye-gaze and arrow pointing distractor cues on voluntary eye movements' Perception & Psychophysics 69, (6) 966-971 Publisher Site , DOI
(2006) 'There's more to magic than meets the eye' Current Biology 16, (22) R950-R951 Publisher Site , DOI
(2006) 'Differences in the types of musical regularity learnt in incidental- and intentional-learning conditions' Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 59, (10) 1725-1744 Publisher Site , DOI
(2005) 'Magic and Fixation: Now You Don't See it, Now You Do' Perception 34, (9) 1155-1161 Publisher Site , DOI
(2005) 'Implicit Learning of Nonlocal Musical Rules: Implicitly Learning More Than Chunks' Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 31, (6) 1417-1432 Publisher Site , DOI
Chapters
(2022) 'What can Magic Reveal About the Brain' Encyclopedia of Behavioral Neuroscience, 2nd edition Elsevier 597-604 Publisher Site , DOI
(2011) 'Communicating structure, affect, and movement' Language and Music as Cognitive Systems Oxford University Press 156-168 Publisher Site , DOI
Conference Papers
(2018) 'Why game designers should study magic' FDG '18: Foundations of Digital Games 2018 ACM Publisher Site , DOI
(2010) 'The influence of attention on the negative compatibility effect' 1152-1152
(2010) 'The role of attention in a masked-prime effect' 81-81
(2010) 'The importance of being present: The effect of a real or videotaped person on visual attention' 543-543