Here’s a dark-on-light, bubble version of The Kanizsa triangle.  The triangle is usually shown in white against black circles and lines, and can even look slightly brighter than background, though its edges are only indicated by the gaps in the lines and by the segments missing from the circles.   The brain adds the edges and fills in the triangle, as the most probable explanation for what’s missing.  The effect was created by Gaetano Kanizsa, as a demonstration of subjective contours, which in turn were first explored a bit over a century ago, as examples of Gestalt theory.  Bit of a link for enthusiasts that – ditto the following links – but if technical stuff is for you, there’s a great historical survey of the theory.  The theory as then developed is not now accepted, and just how the brain reconstructs the triangle is still debated.

Like many geometric illusions, and like the watercolour illusion (see recent post), the Kanizsa triangle also appears when reversed out as a black shape against bright lines and segments.  So here I’ve recruited some soap bubbles as a background to the effect.

As with other pictures on the site, unless an image is externally sourced, and we indicate that copyright may be asserted, you are welcome to download this images and use it for any private, non-commercial purposes.  But if you might like to buy a professionally produced print, check out our Cafepress site.

How do YOU see the figure above?  It would be really helpful to have your comments, preferably before you read on.

Update 28/Sept/2012  Many thanks for observations – I’ll hold off publishing them to avoid influencing subsequent observers!

So what’s it about?

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I’m currently giving a hand with an exhibition on the science and art of illusion, called IllusoriaMente, which will be on in Alghero, Sardinia (italy) in the first week in September, in association with the annual European Conference on Visual Perception.  During the preparations I’ve come across this illusion, which I’d heard of but not checked out.  It’s beautiful and extraordinary.  The areas bounded by three wiggly loops in the picture look different colours, as if just tinted with watercolour, but the effect depends on the brain doing the colouring in.  Each boundary is made up of a dark and a lighter strip.  The infilling always takes its cue from the colour of the lighter strip, and always in the direction from the darker strip towards and beyond the lighter strip.  So in this image, the effect is a bit paradoxical.  The colour appears inside the two islands on the left, in comparison with the white background.  Yet to the right the colouring is outside the island, with the island itself looking a brighter shade of white than the overall background.

Two different processes seem to be co-operating, a colouring effect, and a figure/ground effect, enhancing the separation between the surrounded areas and the background.  If you like a bit more technicality, there’s a Scholarpedia article, with references to academic papers, edited by Baingio Pinna, one of the pioneers researching into the effect (and the organsiser of this year’s ECVP conference in Alghero).

Note added at 10/12/12:  check out our slightly more recent post on the watercolour illusion in reverse.

I remember being baffled by the illusion to the left when I was a child.  I think it was the first illusion I saw. The upper and lower blades are identical, but the lower one looks a lot larger. It’s called the  Jastrow illusion, and it’s not surprising I was amazed by it, because it’s as puzzling today as it was when Jastrow first published it, over a hundred years ago. To the right are two versions of a similarly mysterious illusion, known either as Titchener’s Circles, (or sometimes as the Ebbinghaus Illusion).  The central circles are objectively identical in size as seen to left and right, yet they look smaller when surrounded by the bigger circles and larger when surrounded by smaller circles.

Usually both illusions, Jastrow’s and Titchener’s, have been explained as the result of enhancement of contrasts in size. The key aspect of the Jastrow illusion, the theory goes, is the contrast between the long upper edge of the lower blade, and the short lower edge of the upper blade. The brain amplifies the size contrast between these edges, it is suggested, and the size of the whole figures gets adjusted in the process. The same kind of ramping up size contrast is proposed to explain the circles illusion, but this time it’s the contrast between the inner and outer circles. However, Jacques Ninio, from whose personal site I took the lower right figure, has a much more interesting suggestion …..

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This is another demo to see whether it’s true, as has often been claimed, that the Poggendorff illusion is much weaker when it’s seen in three dimensions.  To my eye, it’s not true:  in this lash-up of bits and pieces in my back yard, the illusion is still strong.  The long rod is straight as it passes behind the plank, but for me it looks just as decidedly misaligned either side of it when seen in 3D as when seen as a 2D photo.

To see the effect in three-dimensions, you’ll have to know how to view stereo picture pairs without a viewer, in what’s called “cross-eyed” mode.  If you don’t yet know that trick, you’ll find a tutorial at

http://spdbv.vital-it.ch/TheMolecularLevel/0Help/StereoView.html

But best to give it a miss if you have any problems with your eyes (apart from just being short sighted or colour blind, like I am) – or if viewing stereo pictures like these turns out to make you feel strange or queezy

Many theorists have suggested that the Poggendorff illusion arises because we try to impose an inappropriate 3D interpretation on a 2D figure, which is the usual form in which the illusion is presented. It’s a very reasonable theory that might work in various ways, but as it happens, I just don’t think it’s true.

When we see the figure presented as a stereo image, as at the head of this post, so the theory goes, the illusion should vanish.

For more detail, see our earlier post on the Poggendorff illusion and depth processing:  http://www.opticalillusion.net/optical-illusions/the-poggendorff-illusion-and-depth-processing/

There’s another 3-D demo towards the end of that, but with the rod behind the plank in a plane parallel to that of the plank – in other words, not receding from us diagonally into the distance, like the rod in my back yard demo.  In this post, I wanted to check that the receding rod made no difference, and to my eye, it doesn’t, and nor does changing the orientation of the plank. The Poggendorff misalignment does look less in the lower pair, but that’s just because the plank that gets in the way in the lower images is at an angle where it looks much thinner.  It’s well-known that the illusion gets stronger as the gap between the rod segments gets wider.

Here’s a new way of looking at the Muller-Lyer illusion – paradoxically.

In the Muller-Lyer illusion, a line segment ending with outward pointing arrowheads looks shorter than an identical segment ending with inward pointing arrowheads. So in this version, whenever the arrowheads are visible, the left end of the line looks shorter than the (objectively identical) right end.

Here’s the paradox. When the arrowheads appear, the line segments instantly appear different in length, and yet the positions of the little globes marking the ends and centre-point of the line don’t appear to shift at all – which is impossible.

To make the point, in the bottom line, I’ve added an animated shift in the position of the middle globe, of just about the extent needed to produce the difference in apparent lengths of the line segments induced in the top line by the arrowheads.

The paradox is an example of the way that these so-called geometric illusions are not really so geometric.  Draw a figure, and if you change the length of a line, at least one of the line endpoints has to shift as well.  But in perceptual space it doesn’t necessarily follow.  So perceptual space can be pretty weird, or as researchers sometimes call it, non-Euclidean, because it isn’t always bound by the rigid constraints set out by the ancient Greek geometer Euclid.

(I’ve changed this post at 16/5/12.  There was other stuff in the original version, but it got much too complicated).

Here’s a movie of a brilliant, double spiral novelty illusion ring.  It’s available to buy from Grand Illusions, and on that link you can also see another movie of the illusory effect.  As the ring is rotated, it seems to expand when rotated one way, and contract when rotated the other way.

It just may be the kind of ring described in one of the oldest reports of an illusion to have come down to us – a description by the French commentator Montaigne, written nearly five hundred years ago.  In an essay called An Apology for Raymond Sebond he describes …

….those rings which are engraved with feathers of the kind described in heraldry as endless feathers – no eye can discern their width, or defend itself from the impression that from one side they appear to enlarge, and on the other to diminish, even when you turn the ring around your finger.  Meanwhile if you measure them they appear to have constant width, without variation …..

However, there’s another illusion, which is more likely to be the basis for the effect Montaigne describes.  It’s the Zollner illusion, the illusion that gives rise to the wavy wall effects described in our previous post.  As pointed out by Jacques Ninio in his 2001 book The Science of Illusions (page 15), a design on a ring like the one below looks wider at the top than the bottom, but is objectively the same width all the way along.

All the same, Montaigne’s description of rotating the ring makes me wonder which illusion was involved.  So I’m on the hunt for surviving mediaeval rings that might decide the issue. And meanwhile, though there are theories about how the Zollner effect arises, no researcher as far as I know has an explanation for the effect shown in the novelty ring available from Grand Illusions (and other suppliers).  I reckon it’s to do with the way that the highlights expand or contract with rotation, but then seem to carry the outline of the object with them.  This is a puzzle which I will be coming back to.

This is an installation called Zig-Zag Corridor by Czech artist Petr Kvicala, in the Dox art centre in Prague, Czech Republic.  He’s an artist who produces dazzling patterned effects.  In this one, beautiful diagonals meander through the patterns, although the linework is entirely made up of a continuous sequence of horizontal and vertical segments.

However, as my friend Alex noticed, when he featured the installation on his site devoted to stunning photos of architecture in a district of Prague, Vrsovice Photo Diary, there’s another effect here as well:  in places the walls seem to bow outwards in the middle, and the right wall doesn’t look flat at all.  That’s because of an illusion that arises whenever long lines intersect or abut an array of parallel or systematically varying obliques, as to the right above.  The apparently bowed long lines are objectively straight.  It’s called the Hering illusion, first scientifically reported by Ewald Hering in 1861. It’s a special case of the more general Zollner illusion, published by the astronomer and mystic Johann Karl Friedrich Zollner a year earlier.

I don’t know whether the artist introduced these effects by accident (and they probably appear more strongly in photos than in the real installation).  But it’s very, very easy for these illusions to sneak unintended into designs - as I let them do, when I failed to realise their contribution to a quite different effect in an earlier post.

Top left is one of the simplest of all illusions.  The yellow dot is just half way up the vertical height of the triangle, but looks decidedly nearer to the apex. The effect was reported over a century ago, and has been named for its original researchers the “Thiery-Wundt illusion” by recent experimenters Ross Day and Andrew Kimm.  A consensus in recent years has been that we are hard-wired to home in on the “centre of gravity” of the triangle, the point at which three lines bisecting the three angles would meet.  The centre of gravity is a bit lower down than the half-way point of the vertical height of the triangle.  So maybe, the theory goes, we tend to take the centre of gravity as a default central reference point, and so we see the vertical centre point as if shifted a bit towards the apex.  But that can’t be the whole story, researchers Day and Kimm point out, because the effect is still there when the figure is reduced to just one oblique angle side, as centre top in the figure.  In fact, in their experiments, the effect was measured as even stronger that way. So the illusion may look simple, but more than a hundred years after its debut, we’re still basically guessing what’s going on.

Whatever is afoot, it’s probably also involved in the Mueller-Lyer illusion, in which the gap between two inward pointing arrowheads looks larger than an identical gap between two outward pointing ones.  I’ve shown that in 3D in the figure, for viewers who have the knack of so-called “cross-eyed” 3D viewing, without a viewer.  (If that’s new to you, and you want to get the knack, search on Google or try this site – though give it a miss if you have vision problems). But you can see the Mueller-Lyer effect perfectly well in 2D, and for a full discussion of the two illusions, Thiery-Wundt and Mueller-Lyer, if you have access to a research library, see Day and Kimm’s original research paper.  Or for just a bit more ….

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I’ve not been posting much because I’ve been struggling with a mammoth revision of my technical site on the Poggendorff illusion.  But now that’s done, here’s a post on another Poggendorff puzzle.

In earlier posts I’ve shown examples of competition between illusions, and included a demo of a paradox when the Poggendorff and Muller-Lyer illusions go head to head.  Bottom left above I’ve shown that last demo again – not so pretty, but I think a clearer demo.  Thanks to the Muller-Lyer illusion the outward pointing arrowheads appear closer together than the inward pointing ones, when objectively the arrow points are identical distances apart (note the reference lines in the middle of the figure).  But at the same time, thanks to the Poggendorff illusion, at the left end of the figure the arms of the same arrowheads, objectively aligned, would have had to move further apart, not nearer, in order to produce the effect of misalignment that we see.  So the two illusions seem to coexist in total opposition to one another, without a qualm. I’ve repeated the arrowheads to the lower right, to show that, at least as I see it, their appearance is just the same as when embedded in the Poggendorff figure.

But then the top figures show that both these illusions can be inhibited, when set in competition with other illusions.  Top left the Poggendorff illusion is normal to the left, but cancelled to the right (or is it even reversed?) when the test arms are illusorily rotated by the addition of some Cafe Wall characteristics. And top right, there’s much less difference (again to my eye) between the illusorily lengthened and shortened elements of the Muller Lyer illusion when we see them in the context of a Ponzo illusion (a scene in apparent depth) than as we see them isolated below the Ponzo scene.  In the Ponzo scene, the size-constancy effect is increasing the size of the smaller Muller-Lyer element.

So why are the Poggendorff and Muller-Lyer illusions sometimes inhibited when set in competition with other illusions, when at other times they co-exist with rivals in glorious paradox?  Any ideas?