The role of constancy in the perception of illusion.

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The role of constancy in the perception of illusion.

Perceptual constancy is the sensory information we receive from the environment around us. It is constantly changing around us yet we still see objects as relatively stable and unchanging despite these changes. Our brain applies perceptual constancies to see the world around us accurately, for example, when we look at something in the world around us, our brain picks out cues from the surrounding environment to enable it to make judgment about the distance an object is away from us. The brain applies size constancy (scale it up) to be able to perceive the size accurately. Cues in the environment enable us to accurately perceive size and depth.

Visual illusions are specially designed 2D images, which are designed to make us misinterpret the 3D cues so that we see a 3D image for example Figure 1. shows a 2D cube, which gives the illusion of 3D depth. We go beyond the information in the retinal image, which makes us perceive the stimulus incorrectly.

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Figure 1.

One way to support this theory is the Muller-Lyer illusion. This illusion is a pair of lines, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2.

According to Gregory (a psychologist), the arrows with ingoing fins provides linear perspective cues which suggests it could be the out side corner of a building; the ingoing fins are seen as walls receding away from us so that the shaft looks closer to us. The arrow with the outgoing ...

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