Integration Biases in the Ouchi and other Visual Illusions

Abstract

A texture pattern devised by the Japanese artist H Ouchi has attracted wide attention because of the striking appearance of relative motion it evokes. The illusion has been the subject of several recent empirical studies. A new account is presented, along with a simple experimental test, that attributes the illusion to a bias in the way that local motion signals generated at different locations on each element are combined to code element motion. The account is generalised to two spatial illusions, the Judd illusion and the Zöllner illusion (previously considered unrelated to the Ouchi illusion). The notion of integration bias is consistent with recent Bayesian approaches to visual coding, according to which the weight attached to each signal reflects its reliability and likelihood.