HS 305 Perspectives in Psychology

How can visual illusion inform us about the nature of visual perception?

Smit Shah 10001003 29th August 2012

First I would like to define what exactly visual illusion is. Visual illusions are subjective perceptions that do not match the physical reality of the world. While experiencing a visual illusion we perceive things incorrectly. Optical illusions result due to optical properties of light whereas visual illusions occur due to physical eye and brain processes. How do we see the things around us? Is what we see the world to be around us, the real world or something else? The scientific study of structure of an eye suggests that, the light which is either reflected by an object or emitted by a source passes through the lens and forms a 2D inverted image on the retina. So the idea of how brain maps that 2D inverted image into meaningful 3D environment and how we project that image around us and perceive our surroundings has intrigued a lot of people and the visual science emerged. Making and studying the reactions to illusions is one of the ways to find out how we tend to see and make sense of whats happening around us. This research is done by visual scientists after the branch of visual psychology developed. But making illusions is not a new concept. Long time ago there were scholars of visual arts who use to make 2D paintings which would appear as if its a real 3D image. Research into this field has led to the understanding how we perceive vision. First of all the vision is objective and empirical. The vision is based on some reference of the surroundings (Contextual) and past experiences. The 2D retinal image can be generated from a lot of possible real life sources. So brain chooses best possible scenario among those possible based on previous visual experiences. We can use illusions to study visual science and even use visual science to create illusions. Every illusion explains a concept of how brain makes sense of the retinal image. We can also attribute this working algorithm of brain to specific neurons being activated in different parts of the brain. But still some brain mechanisms for constructing visual experience are under scientific study and we dont know why the brain works the way it works. I have briefly illustrated some illusions and explain why they occur and what they teach us regarding our visual perception. Illusions can be of two different types. Either due to physical cause (like disturbance in eyes sensory signals) or cognitive (i.e. due to misapplied knowledge employed by the brain to interpret or read sensory signals).

Illusions are also classified into several types based on underlying neural bases: 1) Adaptation Illusions: It occurs because neurons that detect motion in a specific direction become adapted as a response to continuous extended exposure. Similarly the neurons that are not adapted are still relatively active. So net response of both neurons groups produce illusion of things moving in opposite direction for few moments.

2) Brightness Illusion: Herman Grid: This is a classic illusion (1870) in which there is a white grid against a black background. Here we can see illusory grey smudges at the grid intersections. This illusion occurs because brain perception is context dependent. That is instead of perceiving actual wavelength of reflected or created light it perceives the relative colour with respect to the background. At sensory level this illusion is the result of perpetual result of lateral inhibition. New studies show that this illusion may be generated at cortical level. In this illusion the shades of A and B are same but we perceive A to be darker than B, because of the relative lighter and darker backgrounds respectively.

This is checkerboard shadow illusion. Here the shades of A and B are same. But still A appears to be darker than B. This is because our brain sees that B is in shadow so it compensates it to perceive B as lighter than a black checker in full light. Other explanation is by contextual comparison. Checker B is lighter than surrounding 4 cells so it is lighter than rest dark cells. This illusion

shows how visual system is not good at being a physical light meter but how it is good at breaking down the image into meaningful components and perceives nature of objects in view. 3) Colour illusions: Some of these illusions are based on simultaneous colour contrast. When a colour is observed against different background it takes on a different hue. The reason behind the local contrast effect is retina lateral inhibitory processes. Rubik Cube illusion: d In the adjacent image square A appears to be darker than the square B. But actually A and B are of the same colour. But it appears otherwise because of the background shade. A is in full light whereas B is in shadow, so our mind perceives to be lighter as compared to the background and similarly A to be darker than the light surrounding.

Benhams rotating top illusion: When a top with black and white concentric bands is spun we start seeing colours on it. The neural processes behind this are still under thorough research but it is related to the retinal circuits. 4) Size Illusions: This type of illusion is caused due to our tendency to perceive size relative to the contextual cues (That is in comparison to the nearby objects instead of actual size.) Similarly contextually we can also be mistaken due to reference of monocular cues. One of the classic examples of this illusion is Ponzo illusion. Ponzo illusion: In this illusion, we perceive the upper line to be larger than the lower line but in reality both lines of equal length. This happens because we take the reference of monocular cues of parallel lines converging as a hint of being far.

And another monocular cue which says the size of object decreases as it goes far. So in accordance to this standard algorithms brain misperceives the length of upper yellow bar as longer. Moon illusion: In this illusion one perceives moon to be very huge when it is closer to the horizon than when its high up in the sky. This illusion also occurs because when moon is close to horizon, one has contextual cues like trees or buildings indication that the moon is far away but there are no such cues when it is up high in the sky.

Ebbinghaus illusion: In this illusion it appears as if the left orange circle is smaller than the one on the right. This is also because the brain takes the reference of relative sizes of surrounding circles which are larger in first case but smaller in second. But in reality both the orange circles are of same size.

The horizontal and vertical line illusion: Our brain always perceive the lines which form more vertically inclined retinal image to be longer than the ones which form relatively horizontally inclined retinal images. One of the implications of this illusion is that when we perceive to draw a perfect square, the height of the quadrilateral is longer than the base. The reason behind this is in most real world scenarios the physical sources of vertical or leaning lines are longer than the physical sources of horizontal line (Which formed retinal image of same size as the vertical/inclined line).

The scientific reason behind this is our perception of length is based on the angle subtended by the real image on our eyes. For two real objects of same length, the vertical object will subtend a smaller angle (Retinal Image) than the horizontal object.

5) Shape and Orientation Illusions: In this type of illusion one may perceive the shape or orientation of objects as different from what is reality. This type of orientation is caused due to distortion effects created by the nearby objects which we consider as reference (Contextual cues) for determining the shape or orientation. Caf Wall illusion: This was seen at a caf at the bottom of St. Michael Hill in Bristol England. In this illusion the Tiles and the line are perfectly straight and parallel. But they look tilted because of the intensity difference between two tiles and the thin line of mortar between two tile rows. Due to this the light is spread from light zones to the dark zones in the retinal image.

6) Illusory Motion: In this type of illusions we see things and patterns moving around even if in reality they are stationary. Generally repetitive patterns generate this type of perception. This is snake illusion in which we can perceive the circles rotating even if they are stationary. The reason for such illusion is the luminance relationship of the static elements. It has been found that the direction selective neurons in macaque visual cortex gave directional responses to the same static element pairs, in direction consistent with the illusory motion. The low level, first order motion detectors interpret contrast dependent differences in response timing as motion.

7) Stereo Depth illusion: This illusion is due to the fact that there is a gap between our eyes. Eyes form two images which are slightly shifted from each other. The brain combines these two images two form a 3D stereo image to convey a sense of depth. One of the classic examples for this illusion is the Wallpaper illusion in which if you observe repetitive elements in wallpaper then the elements appear to in front or behind the image.

Hence it is evident that perception from vision needs intelligent problem solving based on knowledge. Hence illusions are important for investigating the cognitive processes of vision. Past experiences are very important for correctly perceiving the image. This is proved by the fact that the visually impaired people, who are given eye sight after 5 years of age, are not able to make sense out of the visual images. In-fact this was suggested by Von Helmholtz who proposed that retinal images are inherently ambiguous and knowledge of the object world is necessary to deduct inference from retinal image.

References: 1) Reading Assignments on illusions and perception. 2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion