OPTICAL ILLUSIONS

Maria CHIURCIU
Colegiul Național ”Gheorghe Șincai” – București
Clasa XI-I – Profil Științele Naturii
15.03.2016
 I. THE WORLD AND ITS ILLUSIONS

“Nothing is what it seems to be. Black can appear white when the light is blinding but white loses all luster
at the faintest sign of darkness.”- Christopher Pike

“To man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.” – Samuel Johnson

One of the most important things Immanuel Kant have done during his quite long
lifetime (80 years, from 1724 to 1804) was the writing of ”The critique of pure reason”,
published in 1781, in which, beside lots of other ideas, he beautifully developped a theory
about the relationship between the individ and the world around him, and, more
specifically, about how much we can rely on what we see, feel, hear, smell, taste or even
think. Because, he explained, we do not ever get to interract with what things are in
themselves, with what they really are; we only create an image of them by the sensations
we are able to experience. Our anatomical structure does not allow us to actually see the
table,for example, but only different inadequate instances of it. The table does not
practically change its structure or color every time we close the light or we watch it from
another point of view; it doesn`t either cease to exist when we turn around and leave. And
yet, that`s all our ability of sensing is able to give us. Nothing more and nothing less than
inadequate, distorted, deficient instances of the table, that, besides being so uncertain, are
soon after deteriorated even more by our witty memory.

Our poor brain is quite overwhelmed by that. He wants to know, he wants to

perceive it all!...and he has to, otherway he knows he`s going to be eaten by a bear or
smashed by a speedy car…not mentioning that he`d olso like to seem nice and smart to
the other brains so that he could adapt fizically (by not being killed) and psihically (by
steping up the Maslow pyramid) to the World. So he starts to collect those separate
instances and mix them into some sort of image of what that thing out there should be, in
order to give us the chance to relate well to it, to use it properly, to run away if needed,
and, basically, to integrate it near all the other prior images and create ouselves
“knowledge”. Working with all the huge amount of confusing data he`s given the brain is
forced to clasify it, to get rid of the unimportant part and prelucrate only the vital part.
Further more, we are not able to perceive all the things that happen around us, we are
from the begining forced to focus only on a infinitesimal amount of them. Additionally,
the brain can`t put together the sensations just as he receives them, because most of them
wouldn`t fit! He knows that our ability of sensing is fallible so he thinks out which part of
the information is most likely to be wrong and remodelates it in order to fit with the
plausible part and the knowledge he already hasa.

a
That’s the correspondentist vision of Truth: if an information is validated by most of your prior information, by most
of your vision of the world as a whole, if it is a priori considered possible, you can assume it is true. Otherways, it
would be rational to reject it. If you do consider it true, you integrate it in your Weltaschauung and it becomes prior
information for further processes.In the study of probabilities, that’s called the Bayesian updating, which is quite
fecund and practical, but unfortunately messed up from time to time by what N. Taleb likes to call “black swans”-
things we thought were impossible that appear all of a sudden and cause radical changes in the Weltanschauung. In
phisics, an example would be the transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism…the best approach is to follow the
Bayesian principle but never to forget that truth does not totally depend on the number and consensus of its supporters.
 That`s a startling process, one of the most unbelievable wonders of life. However,
as you may notice, this is yet an adapting trick…and, as any trick, it has got its
weaknesses. And, oh, what an awful quantity of wicknesses it`s got and what an awful
quantity of errors (some more horrid than others) are they leaning to! The cause of the
errors is the frightening amount of questionable decisions that could go wrong any time
during the process of apperception. The brain sometimes mixes up good and bad
informations, discarding valuable and important data and leaning on unimportant details.
If that doesn`t happen it is not unlikely that the most important things hadn`t even got to
the brain because we simply didn`t focus on them, for they were not our main interest or
they didn`t draw our selective attention. An interesting example of that is an experiment
made by Simon and Chabris in 1999a. They asked the volunteers to watch a group of
teenagers passing a basketball to each other and count for how many times the guys with
white shirts catch the ball and pass it. Most of the people that offered to do this test were
so focused on counting that they didn`t notice a gorrila that walked around the place for
quite a while during the game. And worst of all, sometimes, trying to fix the strange,
contrarious sensations, our brain distorts the reality in order to fit what he expected to
find or, even worse, in order to fit some illusion that was taken as real.

Julieta killed herself because she didn`t know Romeo wasn`t actually dead.
Titanic was considered an unsinkable ship and therefore was not equiped well for the
posibility of such a desaster and, furthermore, the faulty iceberg was not noticed by any
of the people who could have understand the danger. (The idea that some unknown
passenger might have seen the iceberg but did not announce the crew because his brain
didn`t have all the information needed in order to see this necessity makes my blood
creep…and the fact that maybe even a crew member saw it but totally ignored the
possibility of the impact really gets me the creeps).

Another proof for our world vision being constitutively imperfect is the fact that
we use ad-hoc created systems of measure in order to express distance, weight and so on,
as we would never be able to share them objectively in some other way…and,
unfortunately, because those systems are human, beside de fact that even the process of
measuring is not exact, as there are lots of factors that could interfere without us being
able to evaluate them well (such as fractalityb, optical illusions, the zecimals of the
inexact numbersc), the systems themselves can lead us the wrong way…and this can
cause financial disasters. For example, in 1999 when they tried to build a satelite, NASA
a
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.
b
A fractal is a natural phenomenon or a mathematical set that exhibits a repeating pattern that displays at every scale of
the measurements. If the pattern is identical, the object is called self similar. As you may see,the lenght or the surface
of such a self similar object differs (multiplicates) a lot from one scale to another, so we have those fractal numbers that
tell us the value at a certain scale. If you don`t know all these when you are doing the measurements, big errors can
occur.
c
There is a whole domain in physics that talks about how we can calculate the exact zecimal we need to know in order
to avoid errors that could affect our work. For example, when you want to get a diagonal bar for your square door with
the surface of 1 m2 , you shall need the length of 2 m. As you can`t buy a piece of 2 m, you must choose how exact
you need the measurement to be. If you`re buying a piece of wood, you might simply ask for a piece of 1,5 m that you
are going to crop afterwards to fit your door. But if you`re buying a piece of gold, you might get interested in the
zecimals and buy a piece of 1,414 m. Such is also the difference between building a toy car and a real space rocket.
used the metric system and Lockheed Martin the English system of measurement… and
you can imagine what naturally followed.

The brain struggles... You know that the most obvious facts could be totally
wrong or virtual or even hallucinations, and yet you can`t assume they are, because, that
way, practical life wouldn`t be possible anymore.a You are afraid of believing what you
see with you own eyes and yet you want to. You are also afraid of believing what`s not
visible and touchable, even if the evidence is undeniable. And you feel assaulted on all
hands when you don`t have good evidence for either of the alternatives ( This chaos is
what makes people like Ken Keseyb , Peter Shafferc or Jeremy Levend wonder about the
accuracy people can have when they consider others insane and the legitimacy they have
to treat them). We feel it when we feel cheated, scared, or angry. This fear of illusions is
what mainly terrifies us every day of our lives. When we have too little fear we are
destroyed out of negligence. When we have too much fear we are eaten by it. And this
trust problem is affecting our relationship with God, with ourselves, with other people,
with medicine, astronomy, chemestry, phisics and all its crazy theories…with everything.

As one of the most beautiful , important and expresive ways we can relate to the
world is by seeing it with our own eyes, I choose to talk in this essay about the amasing
chapter of optical illusions.

1. TO SEE OR NOT TO SEE

a
There are yet people who choose to assume that everything could be wrong. Descartes did so, saying that
the only truth he surely posseses is “I doubt, therefore I think. I think, therefore I am”. In philosophy, this is
called scepticism, and it leads to ideas such as: solipsism (the ideea that “only I exist and everything else is
an illusion or a hallucination in my mind”), idealism (nature is formed out of ideas that we think, not of
actual objects, so if a tree falls into the forest and nobody hears it, it didn`t actually fall), and so on. Also,
the bare idea of hinduism is that the material world is an illusion called Maya.
b
“One flew over a cuckoo`s nest”- 1962
c
“Equus”- 1973
d
“Don Juan Demarco” - 1994
 “Almost nothing need to be said when you have eyes.”- Tarjei Vesaas

The process of seeing works the following way: light is reflected by the objects
and gets into our eyes where, with the awesome help of the eye lens, is “sent” to the
retina,who works like a projection wall. The macula is the part of the retina covered with
photoreceptors, thus that is where vision takes part. Fovea is the center of the macula, the
point of maximum optical sensitivity, with the highest density of photoreceptors. The
receptive field is the area of photoreceptors activated by something we see. The image on
the fovea has a punctiform the receptive field because what matters is not only to guess
the object, as in the corners of the visual field, but to see the actual tiny points of it.
However, the surrounding area, as I said, is treated with less interest. Considering that we
could see the danger even if we can’t count its hairs, the brain lets it be quite blurred,
more or less only assuming what could be there.a The image below shows the receptive
field (darker color) and the neural activity in different focusing cases. The big circle is the
macula, the little one, the fovea.

The photoreceptors are specialized types of neurons capable of converting light

into electric signals. They are of two kinds:the very sensitive rodsb, that work kind of
binary (activated - they transmit white and lightness, remaining stil – black and darkness)
and the cons, concentrated in the fovea, that are sensitive to the wavelenght, intensity
(thus seeing colorc) and rapid changes of the stimuli. The point we are focusing, the
“target” of our seeing, is projected on the fovea and in normal vision it is seen quite
accurately and detailed. The image formed on the retina, small and reversed, is called
retinal image. The retinal image is transmited to the brain by the optic nerve. The point
where the optic nerve passes through the retina is called the blind spot and has no
photoreceptors.

a
Anyway, when we perceive motion, anything dangerous or very intense (distracting) in the periphery, we
imediately turn our heads and focus on it.
b
They can be activated even by a single photon.
c
Different wavelenghts at different intensities can produce the exact same excitation to the photoreceptor,
which means color vision is the result of the cortical interpretation of all the signals from all the receptive
field. Therefore when we talk about colors we necesarely talk about cyclopean images.
 When both eyes are opened, they satosfactorily complete each others blind spots.
Yet, if you close your left eye and look at the “+” in the picture below, you will se that
the white octogon disappears.

That is because your eye does not see this part of the rectangle. But, as he is still
able to see the most of it, which is black and quite rectangular, he completes the figure as
the assumption is what really is there. Scientifically, we say that if a stimulus is in our
blind spot, its colour and lightness fade until they are no longer seen and the area fills in
with the colour and lightness of the surrounding region. That is the feeling in process and
that’s why, when closing one of your eyes, you don’t see a black spot in your visual field,
even if you don’t actually perceive anything of what really is there. In the Troxler fading
illusion, when all the image is perceived as a wholeso we could assume it as being
entirely in the fovea or anyway at least that it has receptive field and the neural activity
equally spread around it) we see very clearly a blue circle surrounding the red point in the
middle. But if we strongly focus ,“compressing and concentrating the fovea” on that
point, the blue circle is sent into the blind spots and, whatever visible part remains, in the
periphery of the macula, which has rare photoreceptors that anyway are probably only
rods that can’t distinguish color. As a result, it fades (as it would be slowly forgotten)
until it mixes up in the background.
 In the brain, the monocular images coming from the two eyes are fusioned into a
single binocular image called cyclopean image (the image we perceive when we “see”
somethinga). The relative single eye that would perceive on its hypothetic retina the
cyclopean image is called the cyclopean eye or the inner eye. Besides the actual fusion,
the cyclopean image is also the result of cortical changes the brain makes when he
interprets the received data and performs the Bayesian upgrade in order to allow the most
accurate and practical visual experience.

Considering O* the subjective point whence we observe, the location of our

cyclopean eye (estimated in the middle of our head, 10 cm behind our eyes), D* is the
subjective distance from the object A*B*(– the subjective perception of the object AB),
dA* and dB* – the subjective directions of the points A and B relatively to the eye, θ* –
the subjective optical directions’ difference, measured by the breadth of the saccadeb
necessar in order to rapidly look from A* to B*, S* the estimated, subjectively perceived
size of the object and V* the subjective depth or volume of the object. I will call all those
angle values. If I may, when using “ * “ after a word I would reffer to the values of the
cyclopean image, while all the previous definitions, without the “ * “ would reffer to the
physical, objective values. Usually, we say that an optical illusion have occurred when
one or many of the physical and cyclopean values roughly differ. Verbs like “perceive”,
“see”, “seem” and so on, mainly reffer to the cyclopean images.

It is obvious that the relation between S,D and θ (with and without “ * “) is

θ = S/D.

It is important to rigorously differentiate θ* and S*. It is hard to express the

difference between them, but sometimes the verbs are suggestively used: for example,
when seeing a big tree from quite a big distance, a man would presumably say that “ it
looks smaller (θ*) but, because it is very far away (D*), I know that it is just the same

a
It has been observed that, when a cyclopean value differs from the physical value, the brain is activated
rather similar to the way it would be by an accurately perceived physical value of the magnitude equal with
the cyclopean value we were talking about, thereby cyclopean images are of prior importance to the brain
and they are the bricks of sight.
b
Saccades are the ocular movements. It is interesting that when you are looking yourself in the eyes in a
mirror, for example, you have to spare your attention between both of them, so your eyes start to move very
quickly between the two targets. However, you cannot perceive those movements in the mirror! The
mechanism behind this is called “saccadic suppression”
sizea (S*)”b. θ* is the primar perceptual feeling, while S* or even D* are usually
algoritmically calculated (mainly based on previous experience, but not only). For
example, long distances are often underperceived, especially when it comes to large
objects, like mountains; but as we are conscious of that, we are able to compensate it at
some level, logically influencing our perception.

a
This is the principle of identity or gestalt invariance: we know that an object must have the same S,
regardless the D. It shows that we perceive objects as real entities and not as only depending on us, like in
the Berkeley’s idealism, case in wich S would be an absurd and useless value. It also shows that we
naturally reject the “panta rhei”…we expect objects to remain the same from one moment to another and
the changes to be logically causally determined.
b
In order to sufficiently express the cyclopian perception of an object in space we have to mention all the
three values. It is interesting that, when seeing the tree, one can say both that “it looks larger than my finger
and farther away” and “it looks smaller than my finger farther away” without making any contradiction.
The reason is the previously mentioned ambiguity: the first sentence reffers to S*, while the latter reffers to
θ*.
 2. TRIDIMENSIONAL IMAGES or WHEN YOU WANT TO BE DELUDED

“If I could do Kill Bill all over again I'd be tempted to do it in 3D.” – Q. Tarantino

We see the world in three dimensions. Why is that? It is because we have two
well-functioning eyes that are able to focus on the exact same point from their slightly
different points of view. a Thus, the cyclopean image can gain perspective and depth
because, analysing the differences between the two images, the brain, by its means,
acquired in early childhood by practice and inconscious rationamentsb, is able to show us
quite acurately what is the distance between objects and how they are connected to each
other in space.

3D is natural. It`s how reality is. Therefore there has been made quite a big effort
to represent the three dimensions in paintings, and, when their time came, in movies.
When looking at a painting, the viewer wants to be fooled, he wants to think that what he
sees is real, and if the delusion does not appear, most of the time he feels cheated and
angry…

Perspective in the graphic arts is an approximate representation, on a flat surface

of an image as it is seen by the eye. The two most characteristic features of perspective
are that objects perceived as smaller as their distance from the observer increases; and
that they are subject to foreshortening, meaning that an object's θ* along the line of sight
are shorter than its θ* across the line of sight. Studying the characteristics of real objects
seen by the eye (including shadowing and other) we can obtain mathematical algorithms
that tell us how to represent distance and volume most accurately. c

a
The perspective difference of the two eyes (caused by the distance between them) occuring when they
focus on the same point, which allows 3D images to form, is called binocular parallax. People with
focusing problems, like strabism, can not get good tridimensional images.
b
Kant says that space is an intrinsec “feeling” of our intuition, so that only by understanding tridimensional
space, which is an innate apanage, we can understand objects. (So it is not the gathering of the objects that
is creating the space but it is the space which allows the objects to gather into our minds).
c
Luca Pacioli's 1509 “De divina proportione” (On Divine Proportion), illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci,
summarized the use of perspective in painting. The laws of perspective painting are more like “explained
results”. They say, for example, that if you play well with the dimensions of the painted objects, making
them resemble the dimensions* one would perceive looking at a real 3D scene, you can make them appear
to be closer, further away or turned some particular way. That is natural because it simply resembles
reality. Brain is used to seeing distant objects as being smaller, so when he sees an object smaller than it
would normally be(θ*) in relation to the other objects, he assumes that it is just somewhere behind them (as
he knows S must be actually unchanged) and he also aproximatively calculates the distance. It`s not an
advice, or a restriction…it`s just the fact that if you don’t play well with the dimensions…you`re never
going to get the perspective and that is all you need to know. Therefore every painter respects those
perspective rules and it would be absurd for one to ignore them. There is not to argue about photos
respecting those rules because it would be impossible for them not to respect them. One could say that if a
painting respects those rules it has the potential of an accurate photography of the reality.
 PIETRO PERUGINI USE OF PERSPECTIVE – SISTINE CHAPEL

Perspective can be used to include tridimensional paintings in the landscape, as the artist
Edgar Muller does (tridimensional street painting):a

a
Those pictures seem to be part of the reality only when viewed from a certain ungle.
 a

Yet, confering perspective to the images is not a real 3D technique. It has got
nothing to do with binocular vision, with fusions, but only with talented people who can
give life to their paintings… 3D is something else.
a
Street artist Odeith , Baton Rouge – Louisiana
 Stereoscopya is a technique for enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by
means of stereopsisb. Any stereoscopic image is called a stereogram. Any person who is
able of simultaneous perception with both eyes, fusion and perception of depth in itself
by binocular parallax should be able of seeing stereograms. Anyway, this can only be
done with some practice, because, in order to perceive the 3D image, one must overcome
the automatic coordination between accommodation (focus) and horizontal vergence
(angle of one's eyes), which is quite difficult at the beginning and a little tireing.

Traditional stereoscopy is based on creating the illusion of a tridimensional image

by showing two bidimensional images with the perspective of the same object slightly
different (equal to the binocular parallax).

There are two techinques of freelooking at stereoscopic images:

- Parallel viewing uses images with the left eyed image on the left and the
right eyed image on the right. The viewer attempts to look through the images (ad
infinitum) with the eyes substantially parallel, as if looking at the actual scene. (he keeps
his eyes more divergent than they should normally be). That way, each eye receives only
the destinated image and the brain has the right material in order to do the fusion and
obtain the 3D image.

- Cross-eyed viewing swaps the left and right eye images so that they will
be correctly seen cross-eyed, the left eye viewing the image on the right and vice versa.
The viewer has to focus on a point between him and the images, and the 3D image will
appear there, in the middle, closer to the viewer, smaller than the other two.

a
The word stereoscopy derives from Greek στερεός (stereos), meaning "firm, solid", and σκοπέω (skopeō),
meaning "to look, to see”.
b
the visual blending of two similar but not identical images into one (fusion), with resulting visual
perception of solidity and depth
MOUNT RUSHMORE NATIONAL MEMORIAL – CROSS-EYED STEROGRAM

An autostereogram is a single-image stereogram.

By looking at a horizontally repeating pattern cross-eyed or with the parallel view

method it is possible to trick the brain into matching one element of the pattern, as seen
by the left eye, with another (similar looking) element, beside the first, as seen by the
right eye. The spacing between the elements is the one that adjusts the distance at which
the image will be seen before or beyond the piece of paper where the pattern is drawn
(called window), as it fixes the needed convergence of the eyes and therefore the exact
point where the stereogram will be formed.

The 3D effects in the example autostereogram are created by repeating the tiger
rider icons every 140 pixels, the shark rider icons every 130 pixels and the tiger icons
every 120. The closer a set of icons are packed horizontally, the higher they are lifted
from the background plane. This example is simple, but there are patterns with douzins of
tigers, and our incredible brain has no problem in arranging them at the right depth.
Random Doth Autostereograms are similar stereograms created by especialised computer
programs that combine color scales and their properties(light colors seem to be closer
than dark ones) with the cross-eyed/parallel view principle and create tridimensional
images with smooth gradience in distance, like the hidden shark below.

But the 3D we all know about is of another kind…it is passive 3D, in which all
you have to do if you want to be deluded is to put some special glasses on your eyes.
How do they work? …in stereoscopy, all scientists were trying to do with all those creepy
viewing techniqes and splitting images was to separate what our eyes are seeing and to
give each one the right image in order to create the so important binocular parallax. There
is, however, another way of doing it, as I will explain below.

Since Christiaan Huygensa explained his theories, fighting Isaac Newton’s ones,
we know that light is not only corpuscular, but has undulatory motion. Its intensity,
combined with its frequency for example, is what our eye understands as color. The
differences of wavelenght are what causes the difraction of light and the beloved
rainbows.

Just like sound waves, light waves are

spreading all around. But, unlike sound waves, light
waves have an additional quality: they can oscillate
in more than one orientation (it is usually found as
unpolarized). Sun light is unpolarized, for example,
and generally all the light coming from light bulbs
and other shiny things. Now, we can sum all the
light orientations of oscillation in two ortogonal
vectors that set the two main plans of orientation.
We can therefore understand light as oscillating
along those two ortogonal directions through space,
to objects and, reflecting, back to our retina,
allowing us to see.

Some materials have a strange quality: their

long-chain molecules absorb light oscillations of a
certain orientation. For example, chaines alligned
horizontally would absorb horizontal oscillations,
allowing transversal ones to pass – halving the
amount of light and polarizing it (therefore they
have a transversal polarization axis).

If you turn the polaroid 90 degrees around its sagital axis, its polarization axis would
become horizontal. If you put together two ortogonally oriented polaroid filtrers, they
would absorb all the light by turn, allowing nothing to pass. Such materials are called
polaroid filtrers. Besides linear polarization there is also circular polarization, that works
similar, separating clockwise or counterclockwise circular oscilations.

In order to obtain the tridimensional effect for a movie, they play two different
movies at the same time, each filmed from a slightly different perspective, exactly as
much as requested for binocular parallax, and each with light of a certain polarization.
The viewer wears glasses with every eye covered by ortogonally oriented polaroid
filtrers, so that the left eye receives only the clockwise
oscillation of the light(with its perspective of the objects
in the movie) and the right eye obviously receives only the
counterclocwise oscillation of the light. The brain
a
Dutch mathematician, astronomer and physicist of the XVII century
will then have the accurately different images from the
eyes and will make the fusion creating the wanted
tridimensional effect - RealD 3D. The red and cyan
glasses use different colors instead of different polarities.

3. GENERAL FACTS ABOUT OPTICAL ILLUSIONS

“Deceptions of the senses are the truths of perception”. - J. Purkinje
 An optical illusion is characterized by visually perceived images that differ from
objective reality. Basically, the information gathered by the eye (the retinal image) is
processed in the brain into a perception (the cyclopean image) that does not tally with a
physical measurement of the stimulus source.

There are two main types of optical illusionsa:

- Physiological illusions – the effects of excessive stimulation of a specific type

(brightness, color, size, position, tilt, movement).

- Cognitive illusions – based on unconscious interractions

It is important to know that there is an important difference between optical

illusions and hallucinations, as the former are caused by some exterior stimulus, while the
latter are caused by internal stimulus independent of the external reality. Also, it is good
to know that the effect optical illusions have on the viewer differs from an individ to
another, according to biological and psychological characteristics.

4. PSICHOLOGICAL ILLUSIONS

“Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do”- Elisabeth Bowen

a
Pathological visual illusions arise from a pathological exaggeration in physiological visual perception
mechanisms causing the following types of illusions. There also exist optical illusions caused by drug or
alcohol abuse.
 Afterimages are created when the eye's photoreceptors adapt to overstimulation
and lose sensitivity. Normally, the overstimulating image is moved to a fresh area of the
retina with small eye movements(microsaccades), but if the image is too large or the eye
remains too steady, these small movements are not enough, so the photoreceptors
eventually consume their supply of photopigment, resulting in a decrease in signal to the
brain (the darkness we see when going indoors on a sunny day). Viewing an uniform,
white background while the photoreceptors are still inhibited will allow an individual to
see the after image.a

In order to see Barack Obama in the picture below, you just have to focus on a
point in the middle of the picture for about 30 seconds and then move your eyes on a
neutral,uniform, white surface. When blinking, you should be able to perceive the
afterimage. The picture in the right is a Darwin afterimage. As the afterimage is always a
little blurry, the tiny white lines cannot be seen in it and the face will appear perfectly.

The picture below shows the creation of such an image.

a
When opposite colors, such as yellow and blue, are added together, they combine to form white. Likewise,
if yellow is removed from white, the resultant color is blue. If white is removed from white, the resulting
color in black and vice-versa. When a certain color stimulus is ihnibited and the eye is exposed to white
light, then the complementary color is perceived for a brief period of time; therefore, the afterimage is the
negative of the actual image.
 Contrast Effects reffer to the enhancement or diminishment of perception,
cognition, related performances, etc, as a result of successive (immediately previous) or
simultaneous exposure to a stimulus of lesser or greater value in the same dimension. It’s
all about another whimsical version of Murphy`s laws: the most beautiful girl has always
uglier friends that make her even more beautiful, while a repelling person is always
surrounded by more appealing ones that worsen the disgracious impression. Or the
anecdote with the man with a big family who went to a nestor complaining that his house
is small and overcrowded. The wiseman told him to bring his pigs in; when the man came
back telling that everything is getting worser, he was told to bring his camel indoors too.
After spending a few days with the stinky, big, noisy and restless animals inside, when he
finally got the permission to get them out, he literally felt how the walls have grown so
big and the family was so small (maybe only 12 members!) that he started projecting new
children with his happy wife in his awfully big hut.

Part of the explanation for that is the capacity (called lateral inhibition) of an
excited neuron to reduce the activity of the ones around him by disabling spread of action
potentials. It is like selective attention: the brain is focusing on the interesting intense
information received by the lucky neuron, ignoring the faded signals of the others and
therefore fading them even more. This increases the contrast and sharpness in visual
response, but is in fact a kind of an optical illusion, as we can see in the Mach Bands
below, where, along the boundary between adjacent shades of grey lateral inhibition
makes the darker area falsely appear even darker and the lighter area falsely appear even
lighter.

Munker-White's illusion is another illusion nicely explained by the color

contrast. Rectangle A has a white, contrasting background and it is covered by dark lines
which seem to be part of it (therefore they make chromatic induction: they “bleed” on the
other color), the combined effect making it seem darker, while rectangle B is harnessed
the opposite way, thus seeming lighter.
 The Gradient Simultaneous Contrast illusion is from the same category. As the
tape in the front is an unfamiliar object and the backround is a lot more imposing than it,
it’s color is affected by the contrast in the backround and it seems to change in a gradient
from an apparently lighter part (with the darker surroundings) to the apparently darker
part (with the lighter surroundings). Really, if the tape would be part of the background,
in order to appear to our retina as having the same color all over it should be lighter in
one part and darker in the other, to counterbalance the background shadow! If we manage
to convince our brain that the tape is not part of the background but it’s somewhere in
front of it and it’s not affected by it’s shadows and luminosity, the illusion disappears.
This kind of illusions is similar to the ambiguous figures I will discuss later: they can
oscillate between two interpretations, and the”illusion” occurs at the comparison of the
two.

In The Hermann grid illusion and its variation, The scintillating grida contrast
and the lateral inhibition are doing most of the business, together with the cortical
adaptation process explained above for the afterimages. When focusing on a certain
intersection point, the others seem to be covered with darkened spots…anyway, the
points you are looking at remain white, because they are analized with the fovea: as the
receptive field is narrower, there are fewer contrasting signals that could distort the real
colours. It is obviously easier for the lateral inhibition and any contrast effects to affect
the kind of God-forgotten peripheric parts of the visual field that are lacking
photoreceptors and that are not focalized verry well. It is interesting that the illusion
works only when the bands are straight. Some theories have been published by J Geier, L

a
Variation discovered by Elke Lingelbach
Bernáth, M Hudák and L Séra in 2008, but they are not accesible to the large public (one
needs to log in on sites like sagepub.com or nature.com, which is quite difficult).

Anyway, talking about color contrast we must include The Pyramid Effect. The
picture bellow represents only an arrangement of concentric squares, each having an
uniform color and the colors getting brighter as the squares are closer to the middle. Yet,
we perceive some rays of light that pass through their corners. Why do they appear?
Well, the corners of the squares are covered with three times more dark area than light
area. As a result, they seem brighter, due to the color contrast.

The Shaded Diamond illusion is quite similar. The brain perceives a lot more
intense the contrast step from the dark bottom end of each diamond to the lighter top end
of the diamond in the next lower row than the gradient of the hue inside the diamonds
and therefore concludes that every row is lighter then the one above it. That creates the
impression that the diamonds at the top of the triangle are brighter than the ones at the
bottom.
 To explain that better we can study the Cornsweet illusiona where the distinct bar
that sepparates a small portion of darker light from a brighter one makes the whole
rectangles seem to have a different colour. It is easyer for the brain to compare the
margins with their part of the middle and assume they are the same colour than to pass
through the difference in the middle and see that the two exterior halves of the rectangles
are actually the same colour.

Interestingly, this illusion can be encountered in medical x-rays, creating, for

example, because of an innocent fold in the skin (which appears quite frequent at elder
patients), an illusion that could quite easily be taken for a menacing blob. When the
border of the fold is covered, as in the right picture below, the blob disappears.

a
Cornsweet illusion and the Watercolor effect are examples of “color bleeding”.
 This is quite similar and strongly connected to The Watercolor Effect. In 1987,
Baingio Pinna discovered that if a thin collored contour is juxtaposed inside of a darker
chromatic contoura it’s produced a strange long-range spread of the less contrastant
colour inside the boundaries, creating an object-hole effect around a large area… the
amazing coloration appears solid, impenetrable and uniform, as a surface color. This
illusion helped science people appreciate better the way the brain understands the
characteristics of the objects, the way he perceives boundaries and holes: as you can see,
the two holes could also be seen as white objects in front of the rectangle, which was
quite an unexpected discovery.

If the colours are differently chosen, they can produce Illuminating Contrast
Effects and even volumetric ones. The inner region of the picture below appears as a
light and bright white, whiter than the white of the background – like a shine or lighting
produced by a three-dimensional blue shape.

a
– more contrastant to the background which is thought as white. For a black background, the illusion is
reversed
 Anyway, the watercolor illusion and it’s view on the “holes” in visual
perception is very interesting and will be encountered many times in the following pages.
It is mainly based on the fact that in a bidimensional image you don’t see actual holes,
but shadows added to a certain context, and the interraction between the shadows and the
context is what gives the impression of hole or protuberance( the V*). If the context is
not restrictive enough, if it is – so to say – ambiguous, the shadows are not enough to
maintain the right perception. A beautiful example of a sufficient context is the image
below. When you turn it 180 degrees (the picture in the right) it will look exactly how the
real object would look if you turned it that way. That’s a pretty unusual thing, I would
say.

The lack of contextual information in the picture below allows the brain to
perceive the dancer both as standing on her right feet and viewed from behind or standing
on her left feet, with front view.

5. COGNITIVE ILLUSIONS

“The whole is other than the sum of the parts” – Kurt Koffka

Ambiguous figures are a very interesting part of the optical illusions. They are
formed because, in order to make sense of the world, the brain has to make some
assumptions. Like the filling in process, when, between a useful annoying black spot, he
chooses to show us how he thinks the surrounding area probably complets the invisible
part.

In short terms, as the gestaltists call it, the brain is perceiving individual sensory
stimuli as a meaningful whole. Gestalta psychology tries to understand the laws of our
ability to acquire and maintain meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world;
their answer is that the mind forms a global whole with self-organizing tendencies, seeing
completed forms instead of just collections of simpler and unrelated elements (points,
lines, curves..) – this is the gestalt effect, best represented by the Kanizsa Triangle. The
brain desperately wants to find a meaning of everything he sees, therefore, rather than
strange disparate randomly incomplete circles, we see a triangle in the picture below.
Responsible for that are the illusory contours, visual illusions that evoke the perception of
an edge without a luminance or color change across that edge and that are treated by the
visual system like real contours.That is what they name as REIFICATION – 1st principle.

They have their grounds in some laws:

I. Law of Proximity states that when an individual perceives an assortment of

objects they perceive objects that are close to each other as forming a group.

II. Law of Similarity states that elements within an assortment of objects are
perceptually grouped together if they are similar to each other.

III. Law of Closure states that individuals perceive known objects being whole
when they are not complete, their perception filling in the visual gap in order
to increase the regularity of surrounding stimuli.
a
Gestalt, [ɡəˈʃtalt] means in german "shape, form", and has gained the meaning of „whole shape, whole
form”.
IV. Law of Symmetry states that the mind loves to perceive objects as being
symmetrical and forming around a center point; when two symmetrical
elements are unconnected the mind perceptually connects them to form a
coherent shape.

V. Law of Common Fate states that objects are perceived as lines that move
along a continous path – their trend of motion.

VI. Law of Continuity states that individuals are more likely to group the elements
of an object together if they are alligned and they have no sharp and obvious
discontinuities. (a broken object would be seen as two uninterrupted objects)

VII. The law of good gestalt states that elements individuals are grouping together
objects that are regular, simple and orderly, eliminating complexity and
unfamiliarity so they can observe the reality in its most simplistic form.

VIII. Law of Past Experience states that under some circumstances visual stimuli
are categorized according to past experience, because, if it worked then, why
wouldn’t it work just as good now? It’s the security feeling of the familiarity.

For example, the fact that, in the picture below, instead of randomly coloured
lines, we see a blue, clearly contoured circle is a reification with illusiory contours
explained by the laws of similarity and closure.

In the following illusion,the question is “where did the empty square come from?”
 It is again an example of reification. The hypotenuse of the upper triangle is not a
stright line, but our brain is perceiving it that way, either because our visual accuracy is
not too well or because the brain wants that figure to be a triangle. (you know that
anyway it is imposible to draw a triangle,or a square, or a circle, the lines will always be
imperfect…but when the lines ressemble the concept, they take its place). When the hole
created by the imperfect hypotenuse is valorificated, like in the second picture, it
becomes unbelievably obvious.

The second gestalt principle is MULTISTABILITY: the tendency of ambiguous

perceptual experiences to pop back and forth unstably between two or more alternative
interpretations (sometimes being extremely hard to stop them from doing that).

An example is the Figure-ground illusion; just like in the watercolor effect (the
hole’s part), the background and the object can swap places in the lack of other
contextual refferences; in the Rubin vase illusion below, the perception oscillates
between two black human profiles and a white Rubin vase, just as the picture in the right
can be a man playing a saxophone in front of the cloudy sky or a beautiful woman
profile.

Or the following image…it can be seen in three different ways: you can perceive it as a
cube with one corner missing, as a cube with a smaller gray cube attached to the corner,
in front of it and as a little cube placed in a room corner.
 You can see the ambiguous figure below as a duck or as a rabbit. Scientists tend
to connect that with the role of expectations, world-knowledge, and the direction of
attention, saying for example that, on Easter Sunday you are more likely to see the figure
as a rabbit, but if tested on a Sunday in October, you’d probably see it as a duck or a
similar bird. Anyway, one of the versions is always more accurate than the other, for
example the rabbit here has quite stiff ears and an amputated nouse.

According to the Law of good gestalt, we ignore details that don’t matter too
much, caring only about the main object and working with it. It is usually very good,
easening the perceiving process, but it also allows the ambiguous objects to appear,
because sometimes, when focusing on some of the seemingly unimportant parts, they
discover their subtle details and lead us to a completely different interpretation of what
we see, of the V*,D*,S* and so on. We could consider that every object has a semaa, a
soul, a main characteristic or detail of its own. There are lots of theories about that. For
example, Plato’s Metexis theoryb explains that the material world is created by
participation to the Ideas, the concepts of the universe which can not be touched or seen,
but only thought. For example, a certain thing is a bird because it participates in the
biggest amount to the Idea of “bird”. It can be a black bird or a small bird by also
participating to the ideas of “black” and “small”. The most important Idea is τόν Ἀγάθων
– the greatest good. Platon uses an anallogy of the World, the cage myth, in order to
explain how we perceive It. He says that we are all in a teather-like arranged cave,
bounded with chains on the chairs since we were born, unable to turn our heads around
and seeing only a wall whereon the shadows of some plaster statues, randomly moved in
front of a fire by invisible puppeteers, are projected. That’s the knowledge most of us
have about the world, only predictions and thoughts about those haphazardly moving
a
seed
b
Μέθεξις - group sharing, participation
shadows of cheap copies of the object in itself (the Ideas)…the fire would be the material
sun. The puppeteers, maybe, the fate. The chains,our stupidity, our close minds. If
someone comes to us, telling us that all we think is real and true is actually a tremendous
illusion, and trying to cut off our chains, we would scream, because we think the chaines
are part of us, like bones, like skin, we would fight and, together, we would call him
insane, we would disdain and despise him. But let’s assume that, in spite of it, he would
manage to free one man and, helping him stand on his feet, he would show him the
illusion. Then he would take the terrified man, who has lost all his beliefs and he would
walk him to the door of the cage. When seeing the light, he would be blinded and he
would suffer. After a a period of recovery, he would finally get out of the cage and see
the reflections of the objects in the water, in the Moon light, and, then, even in the Sun
light…thus, he starts to see world better, to have a more accurate idea about it. That’s the
phisical science in the myth, but can be interpreted as you wish. After that, he rises his
eyes to the objects in themselves – those are the Ideas I’ve previously mentioned; for
Plato, he understands mathematics. And finally he sees the Sun, the real Sun, wich is that
absolute Idea - τόν Ἀγάθων, and he becomes a philosopher. Now, man has true
knowledge about the World in itself…a

Anyway, let’s go back to the most characteristic detail of the things. There’s also
a ravishing chinese tale about that. Once, the emperor told the most talentated painter to
paint the most beautiful dragon ever seen on a wall in the throne room. The painter said it
would be done in an year and withdrew in his secluded cage. When, after an year, the
painter still didn’t show up at the castle, he sent the army to force him out of the cage and
told him that if he wouldn’t respect his word he would be imprisoned for his entire
lifetime. The painter left his cage, grabbed two pencils, one with an intense blue colour
and the other with a bloody red one and draw two lines on the emperor’s wall. Then he
said that the dragon was painted and asked if he could go back to his cage. The emperor
got really mad and threw him in the darkest cellar. The second day the emperor woke up
and saw a real dragon watching him from the wall. The ravenous, and yet majestic
creature was beautiful and strong...it seemd to slowly breath, moving his shiny scales in
order to push out the blazing air out of his forceful lungs. Frightened and pleased, the
emperor asked the painter to explain what happened and found out that, for the whole
year, he has been painting dragons on the walls of his cage, all kinds of dragons,
simplifying them to a general form until he found the bare substance of a dragon. When
painting it on the wall, the dragon was borned out of his substance, like a flower from a
seed.

a
…and could go back to the cage to get other people out, or, more rarely, but tragically, he could fall back
into the cage by mistake, and be caught one more time by the illusion.Of course, when getting back in the
cage, he would be blinded and confused, because of the darkness. Plato says: “Any one who has common
sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either
from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as
of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak,
will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life,
and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from dakness to the day is dazzled
by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the
other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more
reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.”
 That’s exactly what happens when we look at an image. If you find the seed-line
of an object, it will rise right in front of your eyes; all the other ellements of the image
will be arranged by your brain in order to fit the meaning of the seed. Usually, an image
has only one seed, and therefore there is only one thing to be perceived. But if it has two
seeds, you will se two objects, by turn, depending on what seed catches your eye at a
certain moment...one line can change its meaning radically, because it’s not the line that
gives the meaning, it’s the meaning that find the matterial ground in the line, it’s our
search for the meaning which is helped by the line.

In the Young/Old lady figure, the key could be the trends of motion. a

But there is a more interesting approach. If the girl would’t have a necklace, or if
the old woman wouldn’t have a wart on her very big nouse, the illusion wouldn’t be
possible anymore. The seed of the old woman, for example, is not a certain isolated
symbolb, it is a connection of lines that are meaningfully spread around the painting. If
you see the young lady, those things are hidden under different significationsc and can not
be perceived as a group, but when you do catch their common flavor, they are sewing
everything in a whole new shape, connecting to each other, as in the Closure Law’s
example circle and rectangle below:

a
If you perceive the elegant, proeminent mandibula of the young lady, everything would appear as turning
up and clockwise with dignity and youth. If you perceive the ear as a tired eye, everything is aging and
descending.
b
if you cut off the necklace, there would be no reason in seeing the young girl’s ear as an eye, so your brain
would probably not do it anymore. However, it really resembles an eye and you could even think that the
perception of it as an eye is revealing the old lady...even if the perception of it as an eye is dependent on the
possibility of the mouth, the nouse, etc!
c
For example, holes could be hidden objects, as before.
 It works similar for all the other examples. Everything is on purpose. Hidden
messages for the brain, like beautiful, artistic codes that nicely tickle the imagination.

Sometimes , though, the nature itself gives us this pleasure, randomly scoulpting
ambiguous figures (when watched from a certain ungle), like the face-rock from Bandon,
Oregon.
 Besides, we have to admit that even very common objects sometimes seem to
look as faces and seem to be sad, happy, or angry. People have the ability to transpose
perceived muscle strains on the face of the others in the perception of their feelings
(except for cognitive and behavioral disorders, like Aspergers)...when we see similar
perceptions on objects, we seem to get their feelings. Isn’t that extremely beautiful? Not
only the possibilities and the adventures of ambiguitya, but this connection of symbols,
this interraction... It’s like the alliteration and assonance in poetry, where the repetition of
certain letters add flavor to the meaning of the wordsb.

Anyway, in the end, it’s a lot easier to hide the seeds of the second image into a
picture and to create an ambiguous illusion if you use the fact that our brain doesn’t work
very well with pictures shown upside down (that way they are not familiar anymore,
that’s the way we see them the most rarely). If you would turn the picture in the left
around, the bulldog would become the Kaiser running. Likewise, the tired old lady in the
right becomes a beautiful princess (after some alcohol help, the creator says).

a
Ambiguity is not only a visual domain...it covers all the sciences and is both loved and hated by their
dedicated people. I unfortunately cannot show here the marvels of phisics or math ambiguity, but I also
cannot help myself from inserting the famous phrase "I love ambiguity more than most people",which is of
course ambiguous, since it could mean "I love ambiguity more than most people (love ambiguity)" or "I
love ambiguity more than (I love) most people." Quite autological. – when a word or a phrase is describing
itself, it is called “autological”. (funny, “autological” is an autological word).
b
“I wish to see the silence of the seas” – the frequent “s” is giving the impression of the wind blowing
silently while waves roll ashore.
 The fact that the brain is confused by upside down objects is very interesting, as it
is a contradiction of the third gestalt principle – INVARIANCE: the property of
perception whereby simple geometrical objects are recognized independent of rotation,
translation, scale, lightening, perspective. Maybe the reason is the fact that the pictures
above are not only “simple geometrical objects”. Anyway, it’s quite interesting to see the
effect of this change in the acuity of perception...for example, in the picture below, the
facial distorsion of Barack Obama is a lot less obvious when you watch it upside down.

Let’s look at the two tables in the left (a drawing made by R.N. Shepard). The top of the
two tables are exactly the same shape (θ*). Then how comes that the principle of
invariance doesn’t work on that? Why don’t we recognise the parallelogram?
Well, that’s a game of perspective. As I said before, our brain wants to see things
tridimensional, so if he finds anything to link this perception to, he will see things
tridimensional. The two tables are made to look like they are viewed in perspective, so
that the bottom part of the image is closer to us than the upper part and, as a result, they
are subjects to foreshortnening. That means the two tables really are different (S*); if you
would see the tops of the tables in two dimensions and you would thus cancel the effect
of foreshortening, the table in the left would really measurably be longer and narrower,
while the table in the right would be shorter and wider…and that’s how they seem to us:
therefore, our brain did a really nice job this time. If he would see the two parallelograms
as equal in the picture above, our brain would mistake θ* for S* and that would really be
an optical illusion. The law of invariance remains valid, because we would be able to
recognise the table in the left, when turned 90 degrees, if, when turning it around, the
painter would respect the laws of perspective. Then the θ* of the tops of the two tables
would surely not be equal (the top of the second one would be longer and narrower) but
they would evoke the same table (S*) and our brain would know that, which is quite
reassuring. Also, if you cancel the perspective-inducing ellements, the brain has no
problem in recognising the parallelograms.

Such illusions caused by flourishing the tendency of the brain to perceive depth in
bidimensional images (according to rules of perspective) work all in the same way. The
simplest is the Ponzo illusion in the right, where the brain perceives the upper line as
being larger(S*) because, according to the rules of perspective (the perspective being
induced by the parallel black train-track-like lines that do respect its rules), if the size θ*
is identical (and it is, and the brain knows that),the outlying one should really be larger
(S*). Same with the R.N. Shepard painting in the middle or the photo in the right.
 A correlated illusion is the Müller-Lyer one. Even though the lines are equal, the
inferior one seems shorter. That can again be explained by the rules of perspective. The
arrow configuration “angles in” is known be the brain to be found in the front side of an
object, while the “angles out” configuration occurs at the far end of a room, for instance.
So, given no further information the brain assumes the “angles in” configuration to be
closer, and given identical θ* of the two lines, the brain concludes that the “angle in”line
is shorter(S*). However, another explanation could be the fact that the “angles out” one is
opened and streched while the “angles in” figure is a closed object, barely touching its
extremities with the dart edges; the figures themselves have a different size. Besides,
former line is free, on a contrasting white, explosive – prelonged by the two angles, while
the latter is enclosed in the ungles, covered by them, implosiely pushed from both sides.

The Zolner illusion that makes parallel lines look unparallel is also based on the
perception of depth (the assuption of V*). Because of the little parralel lines, each row
arranged at 90 degrees from the other, we have the impression that the vertical ones are
something like a fence, while the others are lines on the ground. As the lines do not look
the way we would see them from the front(which would have happened if the big lines
were horizontal), it follows that they are seen from aside. As a result, they should be
subject to foreshorthening and if the big lines were parralel, they should have appeared as
converging to a point. As they do not look that way, the brain assumes they are not
parralel, and thus the illusion is formed.
 Another aspect of the invariance principle is the color constancy: an object will
appear the same color regardless of the amount of light or color of light reflecting from it.
In the picture below, even if the banana is actually a quite intense green, we still perceive
it as yellow…our brain silently and rapidly makes all the equations, he observes a similar
change in the color of all the surrounding objects and understands that it’s not the banana
that is green, but the blue light that makes it seem that way.

The pictures belowa are similar to the Gradient Simultaneous Contrast illusion.
If squares A and B from the left picture are part of the tridimensional object shown, A is
lit by the source of light while B is drakened by the shadow of the green cylinder. If they
were the same colour in reality, the retinal image of square B should be darker. As their
retinal images are the same color, the brain assumes that, in reality, without the shadow,
square B would covered by a brighter colour. Likewise, the two middle squares of the
faces of the rubik cube and the four circles from the right are the same color.

a
The first is designed by Edward Adelson - 1995
 Another assumption the brain is making is the future perception. For example, we
don’t receive continuous stimuli (because our receptors are not able to do it), but we
perceive continuous motion (we don’t encounter motion blur in our healthy every day
life). That’s because the brain is guessing what should happen next and, instead of
showing us what he “saw”, he always tells us what he’s expecting to see in the next
nanosecond, in order to give us time to react. The best proof for that are the motion
pictures; they are perceived as continuous motion when actually they are only “logically
following” instances with bigger or smaller gapes between them. Obviously, the smaller
the gapes are, the better the image will be.
Those future predictions are based mostly on statistics. It is true that without
statistics, the progress would be quasi-inexistent (the prescription of medicaments would
be impossible, for example, as they are based only on empirical experiments). Yet,
Nicholas Taleb shows in his awesome book, “The black swan”, that there is almost
always a factor that we do not consider, a thing we can’t even think would exist, that can
ruin the strongest prediction. He gives a beautiful metaphor: swans were (and still
somehow are) considered the prototype of white and white was an absolutely necesar
quality of a swan and a swan of another color was statistically most unlikely, if not
impossible, to appear; but, then, all of a sudden, the first black swan is discovered…and
that’s how financial crises, wars, and scientific revolutions appear. Furthermore, statistics
are sometimes based on correlations between the frequency of the manifestation of cerain
fenomens. I will show below some quite spurious correlationsa,as a metaphor for the very
real, but stil potential mistakes of the statistics, and thus of the prediction of the future.

a
http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
 Thus, Mark Changizi explained the Hering illusion in a 2008 article on
LiveScience: "Evolution has seen to it that geometric drawings like this elicit in us
premonitions of the near future. The converging lines toward a vanishing point (the
spokes) are cues that trick our brains into thinking we are moving forward as we would in
the real world, where the door frame (a pair of vertical lines) seems to bow out as we
move through it and we try to perceive what that world will look like in the next instant."
Anyway, this explanation doesn’t really covers the variation of this illusion, the squares
in the right that seem to be distorted. When removing the background, the squares look
like that:
 6. THE MOON ILLUSION

“Do not swear by the moon, for she changes constantly. then your love would also change.” –
William Shakespeare

It is, after me, the most beautiful optical illusion in the world. Almost 90% of the
people see the Moon at the horizon as being larger than the Moon at the Zenith (just
above our heads), and 80% of them as also being closer. Sometimes it seems to be the
size of a big plate, I’ve seen it myself that way and I couldn’t believe my eyes! It’s an
enduring, serene image that touches the soul with startling sparks of divine light.
 It’s most interesting that the Moon’s θ is actually smaller at the horizon due to the
atmospherical characterics and the fact that there it is slightly farther away.

An explanation of that is the sky dome illusion. The sky dome appears to be
closer at the Zenith and further away at the horizon due to the fact that the distance
refferences at the horizon are a lot more obvious (the foreshortening of the objects –
linear perspective – and the texture gradients, for example, make the horizon accurately
appear very far). If the Moon is always the same θ* and it is considered to be on the sky
dome, at the points where D* is the biggest, S* would be the biggest too. But this theory
has got two problems: firstly, the Moon usually appears to be also closer, so the D* at the
horizon is smaller, and the θ* is prooved to be changing (thus θ* is the one that makes the
Moon seem larger at the horizon).

The newest explanation, that seems to work, is extremely vast and complex, but in
short terms it is based on ocular macropsia: when one shifts the focus and convergence of
one's eyes from a nearby viewed object to a much greater distance, the object’s θ* looks
larger than it did (let’s therefore say, larger than θ). Therefore, as the equation is θ = S/D,
either S* is bigger than S, either D* is smaller than D, either both the illusions appear.a
As the horizon moon is very near to all the linear perspective and texture gradients
refferences for huge distances, the eyes naturally diverge as looking ad infinitum, thus
occuring macropsia. The sky of Zenith Moon is perceived as closer, therefore the effect
of the macropsia is less intense.

a
http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03207585#page-1