Grouping by Contrast

2011 Second prize
Erica Dixon, Arthur Shapiro & Kai Hamburger
American University, USA, Universität Giessen, Germany
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Luminance levels of four disks modulate in time. The top two disks become white when the bottom two disks become black, and viceversa. When placed against a split background, the disks group together along the diagonals. This grouping pattern follows the contrasts of the disks relative to their backgrounds.

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Bouncing Brains

Thorsten Hansen, Kai Hamburger, & Karl R. Gegenfurtner

University of Giessen, Germany
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Please relax and look at the colorful brains: aren’t they rotating and bouncing?! They are, but only in your head.

What’s going on? Some regions in the brains are darker, some lighter than the background. The perceived location of the separation between light and dark regions changes as the background is modulated, causing each brain to jiggle and bounce. In some regions these illusory motions of neighboring brains are coherent and are grouped together to give rise to an even stronger illusion.

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’Weaves’ and the Hermann Grid

Kai Hamburger & Arthur Shapiro

University of Giessen, Germany, and Bucknell University, USA
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The Rotating-Tilted-Lines Illusion

Simone Gori & Kai Hamburger

Brain Research Unit University of Freiburg, Germany

When one approaches the stimulus pattern, the radial lines appear to rotate in a counterclockwise direction, whereas when one recedes from it, they appear to rotate clockwise. In the complex version of the pattern, the illusory rotation is stronger and there may be some residual counter rotation in the surround.

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