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Why are our eyes fooled by optical illusions? New research shows that this is not a problem of brain processing power, but rather of the "hardware" of the visual system.

Wen| Thomas Ling

translation| Mai Li

edit| Wen Jing

The original article was published in Science Focus 2023.09

(Image credit: Wikipedia) Optical illusions create the illusion that your eyes are being fooled. Although the left end of the bar in the center of the image appears lighter than the right, it is actually uniform in color, and the optical illusion is caused by the changing background color in the image.

The structure of our eyes is limited, and optical illusions like these have long fascinated us. People wonder why these images can so easily mislead us.

A breakthrough study from the University of Exeter seems to have solved the mystery: high-contrast color differences cause visual illusions because of the limitations of our eye structure, not because of more complex thinking processes involving environment and prior knowledge. The research was published as a paper in PLOS Computational Biology.

In short, the study suggests that being fooled by optical illusions is not a matter of brain processing power, but of the "hardware" of the visual system.

"This statement recalls many other long-standing hypotheses about the mechanism of optical illusion. "Dr. Jolyon Troscianko, one of the authors of the paper, said.

From previous research, we know that eye and brain communication depends on nerve cells that can transmit information. However, as Trosianko notes,"there is a limit to how fast nerve cells can transmit information, and previous studies have not considered how this limitation might affect our ability to perceive color."

The visual nerve is a speed-limited "broadband" In this study, scientists created a computer model to mimic a characteristic of the human eye similar to "limited bandwidth"-the limited speed at which information is transmitted and to replicate the way the eye perceives visual information. The results showed that when the model analyzed optical illusions, it was fooled by high-contrast color differences, resulting in false perceptions of the images.

"In recognizing color contrast, the optic nerve is equivalent to a 'broadband' with limited speed. Our model shows how nerve cells transmit information to each other so that we can see strong color contrasts. In the process, the information is 'compressed'-compression can create errors and further lead to visual illusions. "Trosianko said.

Scientists say the simulation shows that different neurons have different regulatory mechanisms when dealing with a range of subtle changes in color. "For example, some nerve cells are very sensitive to gray areas in the medium size range, but are easily fooled by strong color contrast," Trosianko said.

"At the same time, there are neurons responsible for larger and smaller scales of vision that are less sensitive to strong color contrasts, but they can recognize soft color contrasts, allowing us to perceive significant black-white differences. "

The mechanisms by which visual nerve cells transmit information in other animals may differ from those in humans, so in the future scientists hope to use computer models to explore more types of color perception.

(Image source: Wikipedia)

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