Back

The Rotating Snake Illusion is a straightforward consequence of non-linearity in arrays of standard motion detectors

Bach, M.; Atala-Gerard, L.

2020-05-02 neuroscience
10.1101/2020.04.30.070623 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The Rotating Snakes illusion is a motion illusion based on repeating, asymmetric luminance patterns. Recently, we found certain grey-value conditions where a weak, illusory motion occurs in the opposite direction. Of the four models for explaining the illusion, one (Backus and Oruc, 2005) also explains the unexpected perceived opposite direction. We here present a simple new model, without free parameters, based on an array of standard correlation-type motion detectors with a subsequent non-linearity (e.g., saturation) before summing the detector outputs. The model predicts (1) the pattern-appearance motion illusion for steady fixation, (2) an illusion under the real-world situation of saccades across or near the pattern (pattern shift), (3) a relative maximum of illusory motion for the same grey values where it is found psychophysically, and (4) the inverse illusion for certain luminance values. We submit that the models sparseness of assumptions justifies adding a fifth model to explain this illusion.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.