Michelle Dawson posts
Structured cited links
Paola Bressan, Peter Kramer (2021). Most findings obtained with untimed visual illusions are confounded. Center for Open Science.
Abstract
Visual illusions do not just help uncover how people perceive reality but are also used to investigate cognitive styles, cultural differences, and mental disorders like autism or schizophrenia. Participants are often free to inspect the illusions, and some take longer than others to do so. Here we show, for the first time, that spontaneous inspection time changes illusion strength in counterintuitive ways: some illusions decrease, others remain the same, and still others increase over the first few seconds they are looked at. Differences in how individuals perceive illusions are typically attributed to inequalities in their mental processes or capacity. Yet we demonstrate that these differences may, instead, simply be due to differences in the time taken to inspect the illusions—which does happen to vary, randomly or systematically, between individuals and groups. Thus, some well-established disparities in how different people see illusions (and the world more broadly) may themselves be illusory.
Study authors in this cited reference