On Friday, October 31, 2025, at 4:00 PM, "The 33rd Kanizsa Lecture," entitled "How do magic tricks really work? From basic research on the phenomenology of perception to applications in road safety", will take place in the Aula Venezian, Central Building A of the University Campus at Piazzale Europa 1.

The Kanizsa Lecture, a public event traditionally organized by the University of Trieste in honor of Gaetano Kanizsa, will be delivered this year by professor Vebjørn Ekroll, Department of Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen. The event, which has an educational focus, will be held in English, with a live video stream on the University's YouTube channel.

Abstract: 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.

Gaetano Kanizsa, a full professor at the University of Trieste for 35 years, was a leading figure in Italian psychology. Born in Trieste on August 18, 1913, he graduated from the University of Padua in 1938 and was appointed professor of Psychology at the University of Trieste in 1953. His scientific interests focused on the study of visual perception, and he achieved international fame for his research on amodal completion and "subjective contours." The famous triangle was first presented at the 10th Congress of Italian Psychologists in Chianciano in 1955.