A Tour of Psychological and Visual Illusions
In 2014, "Seeing Jesus in the toast" study won the Ig Nobel Prize. Obviously what we are seeing in our mind is not a complete copy of the visual world surrounding us. At a perceptual level, visual illusions show us the discrepancies between our percepts and visual inputs to us. We can also find analogous phenomena at a psychological level; we feel presence of face in absence of face (face pareidolia) and we feel animacy for obviously inanimate objects (animacy perception). In the first part of this talk, I will demonstrate some visual illusions I have played with. Then, I will introduce our recent experimental studies on psychological illusions, e.g., face pareidolia and animacy perception. Finally I may give a brief discussion regarding the implication and relation of the psychological and visual illusion.