Counter-intuitive illusory contours

2010 Second prize
University of Sydney, Australia

In many natural scenes, portions of occluding surfaces and contours can be camouflaged by having an identical color as their background. It is now well known that the visual system will often generate illusory contours and surfaces in order to fill-in this missing information. It is widely believed that the visual system does this in order to provide the best overall “explanation” of the images that form in our eyes. In this illusion, four circular disks are simply translated back and fourth over a thin square outline. Although all of the image data is fully “explained” by the visible disks, the visual system generates a strong and clearly visible additional illusory contour inside the square outline. This illusion cannot be understood with any known mechanism or theory that has been proposed to explain the formation of illusory contours. This quicktime movie is best viewed by downloading it and playing it in “loop” mode.

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World’s Largest Lightness Illusion

Barton Anderson & Jonathan Winawer

University of South Wales, Australia & MIT, USA

In this illusion, it appears that there is one set of black figures and one set of white figures. In fact, the two sets of figures are exactly identical. They appear different because the surrounding regions they are on cause the visual system to segment the images into layers. Thus one set appears to be white figures behind dark clouds, and the other set appears to be dark figures behind light clouds. If you cut out the figures you will see that they are identical!

See the illusion: movie

Read more about the illusion and possible explanations

Image segmentation and lightness perception Barton L. Anderson & Jonathan Winawer Nature. 2005. 434:79-83

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