On Cognitive Primitives and Trick Photography

Magic shows, advertising campaigns, and political propaganda all take advantage of the fact that one's perception of a given moving image is deeply influenced by past experience and emotional state. The art of these deceptions is to tell us what we expect to see, safe in the knowledge that so much of human perception takes place subconsciously that the trickery routinely passes unnoticed. The present paper argues that the often-forgotten investigations of perceptual causality by the Belgian cognitive psychologist Albert Michotte - summarised in Michotte (1963) - suggest ways in which deceitful cinematography might be forensically deconstructed.