"****FINAL CALL FOR ILLUSION SUBMISSIONS: THE WORLD'S 7TH ANNUAL BEST ILLUSION OF THE YEAR CONTEST****
http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com
The 2011 Best Illusion of the Year Contest will be held in Naples, Florida (Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts, http://www.thephil.org/) on Monday, May 9th, 2011, as an official satellite of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS) conference. The Naples Philharmonic Center is an 8-minute walk from the main VSS headquarters hotel in Naples, and is thus central to the VSS conference.
Past contests have been highly successful in drawing public attention to vision research, with over ***FIVE MILLION*** website hits from viewers all over the world, as well as hundreds of international media stories. The First, Second and Third Prize winners at the 20019 contest were Koukichi Sugihara (Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences, Japan), Bart Anderson (University of Sydney, Australia), and Jan Kremlacek (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic)."
Which illusions do you think best help us inderstand the visual system?
Why do you think scientists woudl put on a contest for illusions?
Check out the parent site as well at (http://neuralcorrelate.com/) they are up to some cool stuff.
What would you do if you were a student in this lab?
These three illusions were crazy! In the first illusion, it looked like the ramps were pointed upward, so it was mind-boggling to see the balls rolling up the slope, so we thought. However, it ended up that we saw the ramps at a certain angle that made us see them as being slanted upward. However, when the angle was rotated, we saw that the ramps were actually angled downward. I believe an aspect of this is that our brain uses Heuristics, meaning it finds what works most of the time, or what is most common. On the other hand, algorithm is when something works every time, such as adding 2 + 2 and getting 4. It works every single time. The textbook version of this is with the squiggly lines forming an X shape. We see the shape where the green line forms the X shape with the black line. This is also called the good continuation rule is described as a Gestalt grouping rule stating that two elements will tend to group together if they seem to lie on the same contour. Gestalt grouping rules are a set of rules describing which elements in a picture will appear to group together. The Gestalt Heuristic is where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, in the book there were pictures of lines formed in kind of a circle. We would perceive that the lines across from each other would be grouped together to form a single line. There are three Gestalt Perceptual Groupings. These include similarity, proximity, and parallelism. Similarity is that similar objects go together whereas proximity is the fact that things close together will be grouped together. Parallelism is the assumption that parallel contours are likely to belong to the same figure. Other terms that relate to this are symmetry, common region, and connectedness. Symmetry is the fact that symmetrical regions are more likely to be seen as a figure. An example of this is the vase and the two faces. Common region is another Gestalt grouping rule that states that two features will be grouped together if they appear to be part of the same larger region. An example of this is the dots in figure 4.12 in the text. The circles around the dots that are farther form each other are part of whats called the common region. Connectedness goes along with this example, if two of the dots are connected, they most likely belong to each other.