This study investigates cognitive strategies of experienced pilots and challenges that less-experienced pilots face during inadvertent transitions from visual flight rules (VFR) to instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) in general aviation (GA). Effective weather-related decision-making is critical to preventing GA accidents, yet experienced pilots’ proactive IMC-avoidance strategies remain underexplored. Applied cognitive task analysis was conducted with 18 flight instructors. Participants reported employing cognitive strategies such as continuously updating weather trends, contingency planning, and disciplined self-monitoring, drawing on critical environmental and meteorological cues to anticipate IMC. They reported that less-experienced pilots often struggle to detect subtle cue degradation, assess evolving weather patterns, and resist continuation bias. Inadvertent IMC entry increases cognitive demands, including immediately stabilising aircraft, discerning sensory illusions, and regaining situational awareness without visual cues. Findings support training that clarifies diversion triggers (both internal and external) and reinforces trend monitoring to promote timely decisions.

This research examines the impact of perceptual tricks, particularly the Wagon Wheel Effect, on how we as humans decide on the environment and the management of natural resources. This manuscript argues, using the concepts developed from cognitive psychology, environmental psychology, and behavioral economics, that distorted views of dynamic systems result in the misinterpretation of ecological realities and, consequently, in suboptimal management and policy decisions. Using a qualitative methodological approach, the manuscript synthesizes the findings of the literature research, the findings of documented cases, and the interpretation of actual cases in the actual governance of the environment, focusing on fisheries, forests, water, and common pool resources. The principal message is that the presence of cognitive and behavioral shortcuts, such as confirmation bias, availability heuristic, and framing effect, distorts, in a systematic manner, the perceptions of the stakeholders of a situation, by placing a higher value on personal and media experiences than on factual information.

Presence in Virtual Reality (VR) is the perceptual illusion of a simulation being non-simulated. While research often focuses on the quality of the simulated cues in virtual environments (VEs) , this study examines how knowledge of the external physical environment affects presence. In a randomized trial, participants entered a VE either regularly or with their vision occluded beforehand (blindfolded via the headset) to limit awareness of the lab. Presence was measured through behavioral data, like head-tracking and video-coded reactions, alongside self-reports. Results showed that participants with occluded vision exhibited more intense behavioral reactions and reported stronger presence. These findings suggest that uncertainty about the external environment enhances cognitive focus on the virtual one, thereby increasing presence. This study introduces a cost-effective method for increasing immersion and expands presence measurement by incorporating behavioral data, offering new insights into the cognitive mechanisms of presence in VR.

This study examines the relationship between Newman’s Error Analysis (NEA) stages and dimensions of Mathematical Creative Thinking (MCT) in solving contextual problems on relations and functions. Using a descriptive qualitative approach, 25 eighth-grade students were analyzed through two open-ended contextual essay items and semi-structured interviews. Errors identified at each NEA stage (reading, comprehension, transformation, process skills, encoding) were mapped to corresponding MCT dimensions to investigate correlations between error patterns and limitations in creative thinking. Findings indicate that students’ primary difficulties emerged at higher-order cognitive stages. Most students succeeded in the reading (23 students on item 1) and comprehension stages (19 students), yet substantial errors occurred during transformation (14 errors), process skills (17 errors), and encoding (20 errors), a pattern similarly observed in Item 2. The narrowing of the Sankey diagram flow suggests that the core difficulties lie not in basic literacy skills but rather in increasing representational and procedural complexity, particularly at the transition from transformation to process skills. Case analyses revealed distinct profiles: high-ability students demonstrated strong fluency and flexibility but experienced a “cognitive transparency illusion” that constrained their elaboration; medium-ability students showed inconsistency in strategic execution due to strategic breakdowns and affective instability; and low-ability students encountered cascading failures beginning from the earliest stages. The study positions the NEA–MCT mapping as an interpretive diagnostic helpful framework for identifying cognitive–affective barriers to mathematical creativity. This framework supports differentiated interventions, including metacommunicative scaffolding for high-ability students, integrated cognitive–strategic–affective support for medium-ability students, and foundational representational instruction with affective scaffolding for low-ability students. Limitations include the small sample size and the narrow task context. Future studies should involve larger and more diverse participants, incorporate real-time think-aloud data, explore additional mathematical domains, and evaluate the framework’s potential in digital learning environments. Keywords: mathematical creative thinking, Newman’s Error Analysis, problem solving, relations and functions.

In this article, the objective is to analyze meritorious essays from the National High School Examination (ENEM), in 2017, aiming at discussing socio-evaluative positions in response to the proposal for the production of a dissertating-argumentative text. The focus is to discuss the forms of speech of the other present in the retaken by the candidate, in order to develop his arguments around the proposed theme. The result presented in the official booklet of the Ministry of Education ends up maintaining an excessively normative speech of language and discourse, and we have as an consequence the illusion that the few high school students who obtain the highest grade in the essay test write a dissertating-argumentative text citing the speech of the other having linguistic and discursive knowledge at the tip of the tong.

The neural circuits processing thermal information play a key role in shaping somatosensory perception, regulating core body temperature and avoiding harm. The circuits underlying thermal perception are less understood than for other sensory systems, but recent research has shed light on the wiring, cellular encoding principles and their link to perception. While thermosensation was traditionally viewed as a slower, modulatory sense, it is now recognized as a fast and sensitive sensory system that exhibits complex features such as multisensory integration and sensory illusions. Here, we highlight recent progress in the understanding of innocuous thermal processing and perception and attempt to identify the principles of wiring of the thermal system and cellular encoding of temperature across mammals and insects. Intriguingly, while warm and cool reflect the same physical property, there are notable differences in their perception and encoding in the nervous system. We argue that the thermal system is an ideal model to advance our understanding of the neural mechanisms of sensory perception and sensory-guided behaviours.

The increasing adoption of video-based instruction and digital assessment in higher education has reshaped how students interact with learning materials. However, it also introduces cognitive and behavioral biases that challenge the accuracy of self-perceived learning. This study aims to bridge the gap between perceived and actual learning by investigating how illusion learning—an overestimation of understanding driven by the fluency of instructional media and autonomous study behaviors—affects cognitive performance in university mathematics. Specifically, it examines how students’ performance evolves across Bloom’s cognitive domains (Understanding, Application, and Analysis) from midterm to final assessments. This paper presents a data-driven investigation that combines the theoretical framework of illusion learning, the tendency to overestimate understanding based on the fluency of instructional media, with empirical evidence drawn from a structured and anonymized dataset of 294 undergraduate students enrolled in a Linear Algebra course. The dataset records midterm and final exam scores across three cognitive domains (Understanding, Application, and Analysis) aligned with Bloom’s taxonomy. Through paired-sample testing, descriptive analytics, and visual inspection, the study identifies significant improvement in analytical reasoning, moderate progress in application, and persistent overconfidence in self-assessment. These results suggest that while students develop higher-order problem-solving skills, a cognitive gap remains between perceived and actual mastery. Beyond contributing to the theoretical understanding of metacognitive illusion, this paper provides a reproducible dataset and analysis framework that can inform future work in learning analytics, educational psychology, and behavioral modeling in higher education.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) represents a disruptive evolution in intelligent systems, enabling the automated creation of multimodal content across text, image, audio, and structured data. This article explores GAI as a framework for knowledge automation, focusing on its integration into engineering education, scientific visualization, and technical communication. A thematic review of prior research highlights the use of neural inference, optoelectronic sensing, and multimodal data processing in academic and applied contexts. The paper analyzes the architecture of transformer-based models (e.g., GPT-5, Gemini, Claude 3), their capacity for adaptive content generation, and their role in democratizing access to technical knowledge. Ethical and epistemic challenges—such as algorithmic bias, model opacity, and cognitive illusion—are critically examined. Strategic recommendations are proposed for ethical deployment, including participatory model design, open infrastructure, and continuous impact evaluation. The article concludes that GAI, when governed responsibly, can serve as a catalyst for inclusive, automated, and collaborative knowledge production in engineering domains.

This study investigates how cognitive illusions, rooted in heuristics and prospect theory, influence individual investment decisions in the Egyptian Stock Exchange (EGX). The research gap stems from the limited understanding of how behavioural biases affect decision-making in emerging markets, where financial literacy and market efficiency remain underdeveloped. The study aims to provide empirical evidence on the extent to which specific biases shape investor behaviour, thereby bridging the gap between behavioural finance theory and practice. Data were collected through a structured survey of 300 active investors, and the analysis employed reliability and validity testing, normality checks, correlation analysis, and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression modelling to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings reveal that availability, overconfidence, and the gambler’s fallacy significantly affect investment decisions, whereas representativeness and anchoring biases do not. Similarly, loss aversion and regret aversion play a decisive role in shaping investor behaviour, whereas mental accounting and self-control biases have limited applicability. These findings are partially consistent with existing arguments within the behavioural finance literature (Youssef et al., 2021; Mansour et al., 2023; Gamal & Wahba, 2025) and their extension to the Egyptian environment. The paper closes with real-world implications for investors and policymakers, respectively, underlining its usefulness for enhancing financial decision-making and regulatory policies in emerging economies.

The article is devoted to highlighting the socio-psychological mechanism of unintentional mistakes and misconceptions when making important decisions that form a picture of the human world and determine the vector of its development and the vector of development of socio-cultural processes with which it is associated. A human being is a being who is able to see white in black under certain circumstances and in a certain psychological frame of mind. Francis Bacon also showed that human nature presupposes the creation of illusions about oneself and the world through the influence of idols of reason (idols of the genus, caves, squares and theaters) on it. Later, personality defense mechanisms were discovered that adjust the interpretation of events to certain unconscious goals and needs of a person. Since the 20th century, special attention has been paid to the phenomenon of human responsibility, as well as to the reasons that allow a person to absolve himself of responsibility for certain of his own actions, most often antisocial or socially disapproved. The terms “locus of control”, “causal attribution”, and “alienation of moral responsibility” appeared. Special attention is paid to illusions of social perception in domestic and foreign social psychology. Due to the large number of scientific studies of these social processes, which lead a person to make mistakes in interpreting the features of the situation and the reasons for his own behavior, the interrelationships between them have been discovered, and options for preventing perception errors have been proposed.

Previous studies emphasize the importance of prestimulus neural oscillations in shaping endogenous brain states that substantially impact perceptual outcomes. However, what features in such oscillations drive perception remains unknown. Furthermore, research has shown that non-oscillatory activity is also important for cognitive processing. However, their interaction prior to perceiving a multisensory stimulus remains unexplored. In this human EEG study (n = 18, 10 males and 8 females), we investigated the role of prestimulus periodic power and aperiodic activity in modulating perception of the widely studied McGurk illusion on a trial-by-trial basis. Using logistic mixed-effects models, we reveal that the illusion perception is associated with reduced prestimulus alpha (8–12 Hz) and beta (15–30 Hz) power over frontal and occipital regions; increased theta (4–7 Hz) power in parietal, central, and occipital regions; and increased gamma (31–45 Hz) power across the scalp. Furthermore, lower aperiodic offset and exponent values in central, parietal, and occipital regions also predicted illusory responses. Our logistic mixed interaction models revealed that the aperiodic exponent and periodic power jointly influence the perception of upcoming McGurk stimuli. Specifically, a decrease in occipital theta and global beta power and an increase in occipital and parietal gamma power were associated with a steeper slope. We conclude that the predominant source of variations in the prestimulus state is the aperiodic activity and that fluctuations in both periodic and aperiodic activity account for inter-trial variability in the perception of the McGurk illusion.

Colors play a complex role in education and teaching, such as directing attention, regulating cognitive load and eliciting emotional responses. This study examined how colors affect middle school students' perception of geometric area. Participants were asked to compare the sizes of rectangles by looking at pairs of figures containing rectangles of different colors and backgrounds. These pairs were created using combinations of colors warm, cold and neutral. Eye-tracking data, including fixation count and gaze duration, were collected, and analyzed according to students' Van Hiele Geometric Thinking levels and their school grade level. The results showed that colored stimuli were processed more slowly than black-and-white designs. This suggests that color complicates the cognitive process rather than simplifying it. It was also observed that low figure-ground contrast can increase cognitive load and that warm-colored shapes tend to reduce success due to perceptual illusions. Conversely, cold-colored backgrounds have the potential to enhance performance. It was therefore concluded that color usage is a powerful tool that must be carefully managed according to context. The results of this study can inform educational activities related to attention, instructional material design, and learning psychology.

IntroductionIllusions in which gaps in sensory evidence are filled in using prior knowledge represent a useful avenue for understanding the constructive nature of perception. The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) vocals illusion, wherein listeners perceive the presence of vocal elements in a digitally converted audio format with none present, presents a novel opportunity to characterize the role of prior experience in auditory perceptual filling-in.MethodsIn two experiments, participants reported the occurrence and duration of either imprecise or precise vocal elements in MIDI-converted audio. To isolate the effect of prior exposure on the emergence of the illusion in each experiment, the participants first listened to 12 MIDI-converted excerpts from a subset of six songs, with one half originally containing vocal elements and the others containing only instrumental tracks. Of the six songs, three were designated as “learned” and were presented in their original format during a subsequent learning block, and the remaining three were only presented in the MIDI format. This block sequence was repeated three times.ResultsAn imprecise perceptual illusion emerged regardless of prior exposure to original excerpts and distinguished between excerpts originally containing vocals and those containing only instrumental elements. A more precise illusory percept (words) emerged only for those MIDI stimuli corresponding to the original excerpts presented during the learning blocks.DiscussionThese findings represent the first investigation of the MIDI vocals illusion and highlight distinct roles of bottom-up sensory features and top-down expectations based on experience in the perceptual filling-in of auditory information.

In the perceptual illusion known as phonemic (or auditory) restoration, when part of a word is deleted and replaced by noise, listeners still hear the complete word. The neural mechanisms that create this illusion by generating predictions of missing information remain poorly understood. Zebra finches (Taeniopygia castanotis) use song, a sequence of complex vocal elements, to communicate in noisy social environments. Here, we found that in anesthetized finches, populations of single units in the homolog of auditory cortex respond to songs in which the original audio of an element is completely replaced by noise as if the missing element were present alongside the noise, despite only noise being physically present. This occurs even for songs birds have never heard, but not if the context is masked or lacks species-typical syntax. These results suggest that local neural dynamics instantiate a general model of conspecific song that biases auditory responses to restore missing information.

Repetitions of a spoken phrase can induce a perceptual illusion in which speech transforms into song, known as the speech-to-song illusion. Speech acoustics that share certain pitch and timing properties with songs seem to be involved in facilitating the illusion, with a recent proposal suggesting that the illusion hinges on the individual ability to detect musical features latently present in speech. The current study tests this proposal by manipulating pitch and timing features of spoken phrases and examining how musical aptitude of listeners (specifically, their sensitivity to disruptions of musical melody and beat timing) moderates their experience of the illusion. The results show that the illusion is perceived by everyone regardless of their musical aptitude, with phrases that contain stable pitch and long periods of high sonority transforming more frequently. However, musical aptitude does moderate the speed and the strength of the illusion. Listeners with lower beat perception ability experience the illusion faster, which suggests involvement of temporal distortion processes during repetitions. Listeners with higher melody perception ability experience the illusion more strongly, which indicates involvement of musical pitch extraction rather than pitch distortion. These findings contribute new evidence on the complexity of an illusory experience in the auditory domain.

Pitch-color associations have been widely explored in the context of cross-modal correspondences. Previous research indicates that pitch height maps onto lightness, and that high pitches are often associated with yellow and low pitches with blue. However, whether these associations are absolute or relative remains unclear. This study investigated the effect of context on pitch-color associations by presenting seven pitch stimuli (C4-B4) in randomized, ascending, and descending orders. Alarge sample ( N = 6626) was asked to select colors for each pitch using a color wheel. Results revealed that pitch height was linearly mapped onto lightness, with higher pitches associated with lighter colors. Notably, this mapping was influenced by context, as ascending sequences produced lighter colors and descending sequences resulted in darker colors compared to randomized presentations. Furthermore, lightness associations developed progressively, going from binary to linear as trials progressed. Saturation on the other hand did not follow a linear pattern but peaked at mid-range pitches and was not influenced by context. Additionally, compared to randomized presentation, color associations show a downward shift (i.e., reported for lower pitches) in the ascending presentation, and an upward shift (i.e., reported for higher pitches) in the descending presentation. These findings suggest that pitch-color associations are relative rather than absolute, possibly due to low ability to categorize pitches in the general population, with lightness appearing to emerge as the primary factor for color choices. This study contributes to the understanding of associations across sensory modalities, which may be a promising venue to investigate hidden cognitive processes such as sensory illusions.

Objective: Susceptibility to visual illusions is a consequence of the adaptation of the visual system, however, their perception or lack of it reflects differences in more general, global cognitive processes. Few studies have focussed on the susceptibility of individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), even though visual impairment and percept differences have been thoroughly documented. Method: The present study evaluated 75 children (ages 6.09–12.99 years, 72% male) and 37 teenagers (ages 13–16.95 years, 62% male) with ADHD, and a sex-and-age matched sample of typically developing peers. They were tested with 103 pairs of illusory and control images spanning five illusion types. Results: We found increased susceptibility to the Müller-Lyer and Kanizsa Subjective Contour and decreased susceptibility to the Ebbinghaus illusion among children with ADHD when compared to typically developing controls. No differences were found for susceptibility to the Simultaneous Contrast and Moving Snake illusions. As for reaction times, we did not find differences between participants with ADHD and their control peers when judging illusions; however, in general participants give answers faster in the illusory trials than in control trials with the same magnitude of difficulties which also confirm the susceptibility of the illusions. Conclusion: Our findings point to small but important perceptual alterations, such as slightly reduced or delayed top-down or global processing ability in children with ADHD. Further research can focus on how these alterations may be useful to detect developmental alterations and understand perceptual difficulties in children with neuropathology.

This paper presents the Singularity Cipher, a novel cryptographic-steganographic framework that integrates topological transformations and visual paradoxes to achieve multidimensional security. Inspired by the non-orientable properties of the Klein bottle—constructed from two Möbius strips—the cipher applies symbolic twist functions to simulate topological traversal, producing high confusion and diffusion in the ciphertext. The resulting binary data is then encoded using perceptual illusions, such as the missing square paradox, to visually obscure the presence of encrypted content. Unlike conventional ciphers that rely solely on algebraic complexity, the Singularity Cipher introduces a dual-layer approach: symbolic encryption rooted in topology and visual steganography designed for human cognitive ambiguity. This combination enhances both cryptographic strength and detection resistance, making it well-suited for secure communication, watermarking, and plausible deniability in adversarial environments. The paper formalizes the architecture, provides encryption and decryption algorithms, evaluates security properties, and compares the method against classical, post-quantum, and steganographic approaches. Potential applications and future research directions are also discussed.

Somatosensory cortical representations of the assimilation effect for vibrotactile stimulation.

ABSTRACT When one fails to have an accurate moral percept, a defect in character is often invoked. Little attention has been given to a certain kind of inaccurate moral percept – namely moral illusions – and what this would mean for virtue. This paper aims to show that moral illusions may in fact be a manifestation of virtue. By examining how an optimal perceptual system can give rise to perceptual illusions, a similar argument is made when it comes to moral perception: an optimal moral perceptual system, or that which a virtuous person would have, plausibly operates by using stored probabilistic information and can likewise give rise to moral illusions. Lastly, in light of this, I consider how we are to proceed. First, I argue that we should rethink our conception of the ideal virtuous person. Second, I suggest alternative moral resources which a virtuous person could use to navigate cases of moral illusions.