A New Way to Discover Optical Illusions

In Chapter 6, we said that researchers have used the modern understanding of human visual processing and the visual cortex to come up with new optical illusions — illusions that could not have been produced fifty years ago, except by unlikely accident. Below, we cite a few representative examples. The “curvature blindness” illusion has some grounding in the general phenomenon of curve blindness, but this specific illusion was carefully constructed from first principles circa 2017, as opposed to being discovered by accident. (Original study) In 2022, Bruno Laeng and collaborators published a study in which they demonstrated that their new “expanding black hole” illusion actually caused participants’ pupils to expand, as if in anticipation of entering a dark space. (This effect was noticeably larger than the effect of merely focusing on a darker visual target, which would also cause the pupils to expand by a small amount.) The “Scintillating Starburst” illusion, revealed in 2021, was car

saved by

• Arden Berg