Our eyes can frequently play tricks on us, but scientists have discovered that some artificial intelligence can fall for the ...

Psychologists have long been interested in how people interpret ambiguous, bistable images, such as the examples below. Bistable images. Top left: faces or a vase. Top right: rabbit or duck. Bottom ...

Lightness perception, the visual system’s ability to maintain a stable representation of surface reflectance despite varying illumination, has long intrigued researchers. Central to this field is the ...

Perception researchers have discovered many illusions where context affects perceived size and distance. A great example of this is the Ponzo illusion (reviewed in an earlier blog post). The Ponzo ...

Most intriguingly, psychologists in the 1960s had apparently discovered something remarkable about the illusion: only European and American urbanites fell for the trick. The illusion worked less well, ...

Optical illusions play tricks on your brain and can make you see things that aren't really there, from static images swirling ...

The famous Ebbinghaus illusion, named for its discoverer, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909). Despite appearances, the two orange circles are the same size. Have you ever looked at ...

Have you ever looked at a picture and seen two completely different things? If yes, you've experienced an optical illusion—a visual puzzle where what you see isn't always what’s really there. One of ...

Research shows that a certain kind of visual illusion, neon color spreading, works on mice. The study is also the first to combine the use of two investigative techniques called electrophysiology and ...

In the fast-paced world of digital distractions, a new kind of viral phenomenon has taken over our social feeds: the high-stakes visual perception challenge. As a long-time observer of how our brains ...

Silence might not be deafening but it’s something that literally can be heard, concludes a team of philosophers and psychologists who used auditory illusions to reveal how moments of silence distort ...