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Annual Review of Vision Science

Volume 10, 2024

Using Illusions to Track the Emergence of Visual Perception

  • Patrick Cavanagh1
  • Department of Psychology, Glendon College; and Center for Vision Research, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 10:1-22 (Volume publication date September 2024)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on June 13, 2024
  • Copyright © 2024 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

Everybody loves illusions. At times, the content on the internet seems to be mostly about illusions—shoes, dresses, straight lines looking bent. This attraction has a long history. Almost 2,000 years ago, Ptolemy marveled at how the sail of a distant boat could appear convex or concave. This sense of marvel continues to drive our fascination with illusions; indeed, few other corners of science can boast of such a large reach. However, illusions not only draw in the crowds; they also offer insights into visual processes. This review starts with a simple definition of illusions as conflicts between perception and cognition, where what we see does not agree with what we believe we should see. This mismatch can be either because cognition has misunderstood how perception works or because perception has misjudged the visual input. It is the perceptual errors that offer the chance to track the development of perception across visual regions. Unfortunately, the effects of illusions in different brain regions cannot be isolated in any simple way: Top-down projections from attention broadcast the expected perceptual properties everywhere, obscuring the critical evidence of where the illusion and perception emerge. The second part of this review then highlights the roadblocks to research raised by attention and describes current solutions for accessing what illusions can offer.

Keyword(s): attention, illusions, perception
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2024-09-15
2025-06-17
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Using Illusions to Track the Emergence of Visual Perception
Annual Review of Vision Science 10, 1 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-vision-103023-012730
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-vision-103023-012730
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-vision-103023-012730
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Supplemental Video 1

  • The double-drift illusion (Liu et al. 2019). Start the movie and fixate on the black dot at the left. The small patch on the right moves up and down vertically, however, it may appear tilted to the left. It is the internal motion of the patch that drives its perceived path to appear tilted leftward compared to its physically vertical path. https://cavlab.net/Demos/CBDemo/.

Supplemental Video 2

  • The frame effect (Cavanagh et al. 2022). Start the movie. The red and blue discs are always vertically aligned—notice the green line—but when the line disappears, a large offset may appear with red to the right of the blue. https://cavlab.net/Demos/FrameEffect/Movies/ClassicFadeBar.m4v

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