Abstract
Presentation Description :
Visual illusions don't “trick the eye”, “fool the brain” nor reveal that “our brain sucks”. Rather, besides being entertaining, are relevant to us because
(1) they can underlie clinical conditions
(2) they can serve as “test bed” for models of normal vision
(3) they can reveal the hidden complexity of “simple everyday” vision.
Examples for (1) include mouches volantes (floaters), negative scotomata, migraine auras, or the Charles Bonnet syndrome. Examples for (2): a neural-network model for lightness constancy which ad-hoc exhibits the Herman grid illusion, and Bayes- or predictive coding based models of perception. Examples for (3): Retinal encoding (we are not “seeing” our ganglion cell firing patterns), “Healing Grid” or “12 Vanishing Dots” revealing the hidden spatial resolution fall-off with eccentricity, and finally our a-priori-probability based gestalt perception.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.