Prof. Anthony Barnhart publishes three peer-reviewed papers

2025 is shaping up to be the most productive year of scholarship in Professor Anthony Barnhart’s career.

Prof. Anthony BarnhartSo far, he has published one peer-reviewed research report each month of 2025. This work would not have been possible without deeply engaged student collaborators in his laboratory and a departmental culture that fosters collaboration and disciplinary engagement.

Much of Prof. Barnhart’s work takes its inspiration from the techniques that performing magicians use to deceive the minds of their audiences. He hopes that some of these ideas from magic can be integrated into formal psychological science.

The first piece, published in The Journal of Performance Magic was his first foray into qualitative research methods. Student researcher Sarah Tuchel ’24 and Prof. Barnhart collaborated with Professor Gustav Kuhn (University of Plymouth, United Kingdom) and Professor Daniel Simons (University of Illinois) to carry out structured interviews with a series of professional magicians who are regarded as thought-leaders within the magic community. They used techniques of thematic analysis to understand where this group of performers draws the aesthetic boundaries of magic. Where does magic end and some other performance art begin? Although many of the themes they uncovered were consistent with the literature on magic theory, some of the patterns that emerged have not been discussed explicitly by magic theorists, paving new paths for considering the place of magic within the arts.

Prof. Barnhart’s second publication, in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, was an international collaboration with Professor Wojciech Napora of Jan Dlugosz University, Poland. They surveyed 50 magicians from 20 different countries who won top prizes at FISM (the magic equivalent of the Olympics) to see whether there were any consistent differences between their personalities and the personalities of non-magicians. They observed notable differences in nearly every personality trait they measured, including marked differences in their tendencies toward curiosity, suggesting that a particular constellation of personality traits may facilitate success in the magical arts.

Prof. Barnhart’s most recent publication (in press at the journal Behavioral & Brain Sciences) is a commentary on a theoretical paper that offered what the authors claimed to be a “unifying theory” of perception. Prof. Barnhart and his collaborators, Professor Hayward Godwin (University of Southampton, UK) and Professor Michael Hout (New Mexico State University), argued that the theory was built on a weak foundation that neglected (or discounted) an entire research literature on the use of eye movements to measure attention and perception.

Sponsoring Department, Office, or Organization:

Psychological Science Department

For more information, contact:

Anthony Barnhart: abarnhart@carthage.edu