Visual Illusions

Visual illusions are subjective percepts that do not match the physical reality of the world. When we experience a visual illusion, we may see something that is not there, fail to see something that is there, or see something different from what is there. Visual illusions not only demonstrate the ways in which the brain fails to recreate the physical world, but they are also useful tools to identify the neural circuits and computations by which the brain constructs our visual experience.

The terms visual illusion and optical illusion are often used interchangeably. However, unlike visual illusions, optical illusions do not result from brain processes. Instead, an optical illusion is the perception of a distortion that results from the physical properties of light, such as ...