Peripheral Action Phantom Illusion

In this illusion, we created an animation of human walking out of oriented Gabor disks. The disks were spatially configured to reflect the joint movements of a leftward walker. Indeed, when viewed directly most people report seeing leftward walking. However, when viewed peripherally (red fixation cross) a phantom action appears as the walker suddenly changes walking direction! The reversal occurs because the local features of the disks (orientation, drifting speed) were carefully manipulated to instead represent a rightward walker. Additional demos are available (e.g. “chicken dance”) showing other peripheral action phantoms using the same general paradigm (link).