[visionlist] Announcing “The 33rd KANIZSA Lecture” - University of Trieste, October 31, 2025.

[Trieste Symposium]

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                      THE 33rd KANIZSA LECTURE





                        (first announcement)





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Dear colleagues,




the 33rd Kanizsa Lecture will take place at the University of Trieste,
October 31, 2025.



This year the Kanizsa Lecture will be delivered by prof. Vebjørn Ekroll
(Department of Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen) on Friday 31
October, starting at 4.00 pm.





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The 33rd Kanizsa Lecture


How do magic tricks really work?

>From basic research on the phenomenology of perception to applications in
road safety


Vebjørn Ekroll,

Department of Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen


The idea that academic psychology has much to gain by taking a keener
interest in what magicians do and why it works has gained considerable
traction in recent years. In the first part of this lecture, I will argue
that our scientific understanding of a magic trick is incomplete unless we
can explain, by appealing to known psychological mechanisms, why it
reliably evokes an illusory experience of impossibility. By this criterion,
the art of magic is replete with tricks and phenomena which pose important
and interesting challenges for theories of perception and cognition.
Drawing on examples from my joint work with fellow perception researchers,
I aim to illustrate how a focus on magic can not only advance basic
research on perception and cognition but also lead to surprising
perspectives in the apparently unrelated applied domain of road safety. In
the second part of this lecture, I will discuss some of the magic inherent
in Kanizsa’s seminal observations on the phenomenology of vision. In
particular, I will focus on the seemingly paradoxical nature of the
phenomenon he called phenomenal expansion by amodal completion and its
implications for theories of perception.





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Venue:

University of Trieste, Piazzale Europa, 1 - 34127 - Trieste

Room: Aula Venezian, Second Floor, Main Building (A) left wing




Paolo Bernardis

Carlo Fantoni

Walter Gerbino


organizers
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