[visionlist] immunity from illusions (particularly visual illusions)

[Simon Rushton]

Piaget looked at suseptibility to illusions in great detail (see his book, Perception, for a summary), he charted in detail, how they changed quite markedly across the developmental span.  Some increase, some decrease.  He categorised the illusions as well, he claimed to be able to explain which increased and which decreased with age.  I was always interested in how his findings fit (or didn’t fit) with the two-visual system story.  Similar questions seem to be prompted if there are significant individual differences.  I never found anyone that thought Piaget’s findings were worth spending any time looking into (note his book is difficult to follow, probably due to the unfamiliar concepts and the translation from French), but maybe his work might shed some light on the individual differences that are being reported here.  His book has a lot of data in it so it might be worth looking for evidence of individual differences within an age group.

simon


On 12 Feb 2017, at 16:53, Qasim Zaidi <qz at sunyopt.edu<mailto:qz at sunyopt.edu>> wrote:

There are individual differences, but they have not been much studied until the recent push by Jeremy Willmer at VSS.

I had a brilliant undergraduate at Columbia, who went on to be a star grad student at MIT, has done start-ups, been CTO of multiple companies, won an Emmy, etc etc, and he had no simultaneous brightness or color induction, as measured by objective methods (nulling on a 2AFC adaptive staircase).  He was also a meticulous observer in motion experiments, where he saw all kinds of effects.

You may want to see what else is different about these students.  I suspect that they will be normal on low level detection and discrimination experiments, but that may still be worth checking.

Cheers
QZ

Qasim Zaidi PhD
SUNY Distinguished Professor

Graduate Center for Vision Research,
State University of New York College of Optometry,
33 West 42nd St, New York, NY  10036.
Office: 212-938-5542; Lab: 212-938-5756; Fax: 212-938-5537
E-mail: qz at sunyopt.edu<mailto:qz at sunyopt.edu>
http://poseidon.sunyopt.edu/Zaidi/index.php

"Dr. Katherine Moore" <moorek at arcadia.edu<mailto:moorek at arcadia.edu>> writes:
Dear vision experts,


I was hoping some of you could help me out with something that made me curious all of last semester. Last semester was about the fifth time I've taught Sensation & Perception. Even though my classes are small (less than 25 students), each time I teach this course I have a student or two who is unusual in some sensory way -- just one working eye, synesthesia, no sense of smell, blind, prosopagnosia, etc.


This past semester I had two students who did not experience illusions (out of just 10 students!) One of them truly did not experience any of the illusions. Another did not experience the vast majority of them. We mostly did visual illusions, but among the few auditory illusions we did, these students didn't experience them either. I have no reason to think the students were lying about it--they are very sincere people. And they both had trouble with an assignment that required students to view some new illusions, describe what they saw and what was really happening, and explain the illusion. These two students didn't see what the rest of the class saw, and only saw "what was really happening."


The illusions spanned the course, which is to say they touched upon many different causes. For example, the Hermann grid variations, including the "disappearing dots" one that went viral this summer/fall were affected, as well as the color constancy and size constancy ones like the checkershadow illusion, Ames room, etc.


What do you all know about this, like what the cause could be for this immunity from illusions of many kinds, or individual variation in the experience of illusions?


Best,
Katherine

Katherine S Moore
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Arcadia University
450 S. Easton Rd
Glenside, PA 19038
Office: Boyer Hall room 128
Phone: (215) 517-2429
https://sites.google.com/a/arcadia.edu/amclab/



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