Not tricks, Michael, illusions.

I have to share this amazing visual illusion with you.

Sean Murphy, an honours student in our lab, was playing around with some faces for an experiment. He aligned the faces at the eyes and then started flicking through them. He was shocked by the ugly faces staring back at him.



We called it the Flashed Face Distortion Effect. But we don’t yet know what causes it.

The effect might have something to do with relative encoding. That is, forcing people to encode each face in light of the others. By eye-aligning the faces, it becomes much easier to compare their shape and the relative location of their features, so the differences between them become more evident. And it’s most certainly related to work on adaptation, and the face distortion after effect specifically.

You can read more about it here and request a copy of the paper here. I hope you find the effect as jaw-dropping as I do!

Matt
mbthompson.com

Tangen, J. M., Murphy, S., & Thompson, M. B. (2011). Flashed face distortion effect: Grotesque faces from relative spaces. Perception advance online publication, doi:10.1068/p6968

Genuine magic, supernatural powers or something else??

Last semester I was given the exciting, albeit at times challenging, responsibility of tutoring statistics to a class of first year psychology students. While a large slice of the course, believe it or not, was dedicated to teaching various statistical techniques and their theoretical underpinnings a small and as I see invaluable component of the course was assigned to beating the scientific method into the students.

Having not studied first year stats myself in over four years and possessing only an average knowledge of statistics at best, teaching this class was a daunting task: thrust upon me was the responsibility of spiking the students’ interest in science and psychology and equipping them with the critical thinking skills necessary to battle the tidal wave of misinformation and pseudo-science that threatens to consume society.

A key principle taught to the students in this course is “Occam’s razor”. Occam’s razor simply means that the simplest explanation or strategy is more often than not the best one. This probably seems intuitive to a lot, if not most of you, but we humans appear to have an unprecedented tendency to construct wild and complex explanations to account for the simplest of phenomena. Are unexplained lights in the sky inhabitants of an extra-solar planet scanning our planet for intelligent life, as this "reputable" news source would suggest or is there a simpler, more plausible explanation? I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Below is a short video of what I think to be a cool “magic” trick. Any ideas on how they do it? There was no camera cutting or special effects. Stop for a second and ask yourself, is there a simpler explanation to the illusion other than “magical powers beyond the realm of reality”? If, like me, you prefer to apply logic and reason, resist the temptation to go here (scroll down for the answer of how this is done) until you have had a fair attempt at working it out yourself.



With great knowledge comes great responsibility (something like that) and I was determined not to fail in transforming my cohort of psychology students into agents of science. I can only hope that I succeeded to some extent, and my now ex-students are at this very moment employing their new found critical reasoning skills (aided by a healthy dose of scepticism) to make an impact as young scientists.



Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au

Look again!

Over the past couple of weeks, Matt and Morgan have upped the anti with blog posts with pretty pictures. Matt shared some of his visit with a couple of stars of psychology, while Morgan gave us a nice summary of a well established illusion. So, now I have to try a bit harder. For this post, I want to show everyone one of my favourite visual illusions, and give you a quick run down on how it works.

I think the illusion, below, is the most compelling illusion ever, and you probably wouldn’t even believe what the illusion is without the additional pictures (I certainly wouldn’t). Seemingly, it’s just a swirl of pink, green and blue, right? WRONG! Actually, what seems like green and blue, are exactly the same colour!!!

Now, you probably don’t believe me, so in the version below, I edited in an aqua-coloured bar that is the same colour as both swirls and zoomed in.

So why does this happen? Why would our brain tell us so convincingly that two colours are different when they’re not? Have another close look at the purple and orange spirals that seem to run continuously around - the orange lines stop before the “blue” stripes, while the purple lines stop before the “green” looking stripes. Our brains like to fill in visual information, so at first glance we see the purple and orange loops as continuous. Then, without us realising, our brains contrast the darker colour of purple to the aqua, making it seem greener, and then contrast the the lighter colour of orange to the same aqua, making it seem darker. That is a simplified explanation, but, wow, what an illusion.

I saw this illusion posted in an online forum, one poster said in reply to the picture, "If we all get tricked by the illusion, then we are all seeing the same thing." This is an interesting sentiment - if everyone's brains process the image as being two different colours, does it matter that there is only one colour when we look at it closely? Maybe not, but it's still cool.

This illusion was created by an illusion legend, Akiyoshi. Be sure to check out all of his other very impressive colour illusions here: http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html - you might soon find out that your brain is tricking you more often than you realised!

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au