Abstract
We report a novel illusion––curvature blindness illusion: a wavy line is perceived as a zigzag line. The following are required for this illusion to occur. First, the luminance contrast polarity of the wavy line against the background is reversed at the turning points. Second, the curvature of the wavy line is somewhat low; the right angle is too steep to be perceived as an illusion. This illusion implies that, in order to perceive a gentle curve, it is necessary to satisfy more conditions––constant contrast polarity––than perceiving an obtuse corner. It is notable that observers exactly “see” an illusory zigzag line against a physically wavy line, rather than have an impaired perception. We propose that the underlying mechanisms for the gentle curve perception and those of obtuse corner perception are competing with each other in an imbalanced way and the percepts of corner might be dominant in the visual system.
Highlights
We report a novel illusion––curvature blindness illusion: a wavy line is perceived as a zigzag line
Visual system processes information in a hierarchical way; first it extracts local orientations, it integrates the local orientations into intermediate representations of contour, and it forms global shape percepts (Loffler, 2008)
Consistent with our observation, the results demonstrated that the wavy line with low curvature was misperceived as a zigzag line when the color changed at the turning point
Summary
We report a novel illusion––curvature blindness illusion: a wavy line is perceived as a zigzag line. The curvature of the wavy line is somewhat low; the right angle is too steep to be perceived as an illusion. This illusion implies that, in order to perceive a gentle curve, it is necessary to satisfy more conditions–– constant contrast polarity––than perceiving an obtuse corner. The end-stopped cells would play a role in detecting relatively high curvature (Dobbins, Zucker, & Cynader, 1987, 1989; Skottun, 1998) These studies have addressed how the visual system discriminates different curvatures, detects a low curvature from a straight line, discriminates different corner angles, or detects obtuse angles from a straight line; the perception of curve and corner have been studied in a different context
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