Mimes Get Us to “See” Things That aren’t There

To explore how the mind processes the objects mimes seem to interact with, researchers brought the art of miming into the lab, concluding that invisible, implied surfaces are represented rapidly and automatically.

The work appears in the journal Psychological Science.

“Most of the time, we know which objects are around us because we can just see them directly. But what we explored here was how the mind automatically builds representations of objects that we can’t see at all but that we know must be there because of how they are affecting the world,” says senior author Chaz Firestone, an assistant professor who directs the university’s Perception & Mind Laboratory. “That’s basically what mimes do. They can make us feel like we’re aware of some object just by seeming to interact with it.”

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