One of the really strong visual motion illusions

[dmm]

Some visual illusions are very strong, this one might be the strongest I've seen yet:

twitter.com/ComputingByArts/status/1743675596268601546

One can place the cursor at various parts of the image to verify that the wire frame is not moving relative to the screen.

I don't know if there is a detailed neuroscience understanding of this one.

May 11, 2025 update: Another version of that, presumably: x.com/algekalipso/status/1921416201642930357

Comments

[dmm]

I don't know the name of this illusion, but doing Google Image search with this static snapshot brings some of its instances up:

[spamsink]

I remember that from a few years ago. There is something about leading/trailing edge detection here.

Possibly relevant:

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-67375-001
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-15881-001

[dmm]

Cool, thanks!

I wonder if this set of phenomena is somewhat related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_drift_illusion

[dmm]

Twitter does resist downloading gifs from tweets, but apparently there are many ways around this:

https://chat.openai.com/share/01cd29d8-9e35-4222-9474-1118e58dbd79

Next thing one might ask is how to write one's own code doing this :-)

[vak]

Good example of how our perception creates an illusion of reality.

[dmm]

I think, more specifically, the model of what's going on which people tend to believe is currently as follows.

Our mind has (possibly among other things) something like a predictive generative model (somewhat in the spirit of the leading AI models we have today, although still fairly different), and this predictive generative model uses input from perception to generate a virtual reality (which becomes our subjective reality).

This generated virtual reality is, indeed, very different from "raw perception".

The main mystery is, of course, not the gap between "raw perception" and "virtual reality' (that gap is usually explainable by existing neuroscience models or is expected to become explainable soon), but how this "virtual reality" becomes our "subjectively felt reality", with all its colors and other subjectively felt qualia...

[dmm]

But, yes, definitely, this is a particularly stark reminder that what we see is very, very different from raw visual perception.

[dmm]

https://x.com/AkiyoshiKitaoka/status/1793597054029316566