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 ...

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 ...

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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 ...

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 ...