• Go to the Web site "Seeing More Than Your Eye Does" and its related site "Tricks of the Eye, Wisdom of the Brain."
  • The main thing to get from these web pages is the fact that there are straightforward, neurally-based explanations of illusions. Keep this in mind and try to postulate mechanisms that give rise to the illusions you will study in the rest of this section.
  • You should experience lateral inhibition in the famous Mach Bands demonstration available here.
  • QUESTION: Try to explain Lateral Inhibition in your own words in a way that your grandmother could understand.

IMPORTANT TECHNICAL NOTE: Some of the illusion demonstrations that are referenced below require that you are running a recent version of Netscape or Internet Explorer that is enabled to view Java applets. In other cases you need the Shockwave plug-in installed. I have NOT assigned any of these as part of the assignment. However, you will enjoy looking at them if you are able to.

• Visit the Web Site The Visual Illusions Gallery. I encourage you to look at everything, mainly because it's fun. However, knowing you have time constraints I next list the pages/examples you must see for this assignment.
  • QUESTION: As you examine these illusions see if you can up with categories of explanations into which they might be put. There is no "right" answer.
  • The Hering Illusion
  • The Hermann Grid Illusion
  • The Hermann-Hering Illusion
  • Negative Afterimages
  • Depth Illusions
  • More Depth Illusions
  • Subjective Contours
  • Color Contrast Illusions
  • The Poggendorf Illusion
  • Organization and Perception
  • The Necker Cube
  • The Staircase Illusion
  • Impossible Figures
  • The Vase-Face Illusion
  • The two faces Woman Illusion
• And these at the Fun Things in Vision site
  • Simultaneous Contrast
  • Color Assimilation
  • The Horizontal-Vertical Illusion
  • The Perspective Illusion
  • The Mueller-Lyer Illusion
  • Stabilized Image