Why do we need two eyes? Why are all cats grey at night and appear to move faster the day? Why is the sky blue and the setting sun red? This book explains the multifaceted nature of perception, and discusses the mysteries of vision. It provides readers with experiments to help them discover optical illusions and the features of their own perception. Illusions of Seeing begins with a discussion on the essence of light and its perception to the human eye. It presents a comprehensive overview of the basic laws of human perception as well as the fundamentals of good gestalt. Subsequent chapters discuss geometric-optical illusions; the perception of form, brightness, and translucency and their interaction with each other; ambiguous perception, color vision, spatial vision. The book ends with a discussion of the perception of motion and its interaction with color, form, and spatial depth with a full chapter devoted to illusions in our everyday life. Consider this your travel guide in the marvelous world of sight, to experience a completely individual way to understand and improve your own perception. Illusions of Seeing will be of interest to psychologists, physicists, biologists, and undergraduate and graduate students within the field of cognitive psychology.

It looks so easy. Open your eyes, and immediately there is a world of objects in glorious Technicolour. It takes no time or effort - perception just happens. Or does it? As this book discusses, the more that has been discovered about the senses and the brain, the more we know that seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting depend on incredibly complicated physiology. This book is about the phenomena of perception. It covers the evolution of the sense organs, through to how perception really works and the phenomena of illusions as keys for unlocking secrets of perception.

Incredible Visual Illusions is the most comprehensive and amazing collection of optical illusions ever assembled, with close to three hundred different illusions, many of which have never before been published. You will be amazed as images flash and scintillate before your eyes, other images disappear right before your eyes, other images disappear right in front of your eyes, size and shape lose their meaning, and you see motion where there is no motion. The variety of different effects is almost endless, and many appear for the first time in this volume.

Looks at various types of optical illusions, including distortion illusions, motion illusions, color illusions and afterimages, and impossible objects and images.

In this volume, originally published in 1978, the authors survey the historical and contemporary research literature pertaining to two-dimensional visual-geometric illusions. They bring together much of the known data, summarising and evaluating theories that have been offered to explain these phenomena. Coren and Girgus provide a new conceptual framework that suggest that visual illusions are not unitary phenomena. Within this framework, illusions do not represent a breakdown in normal perceptual processing. Rather, it is proposed that each illusion is produced by a number of mechanisms operating at different levels in the visual information processing system. The book contains an extensive collection of illusion figures. It will be essential reading for all of those concerned with vision and visual perception, since it integrates the study of illusions into the main body of psychological and perceptual theories at the time.

Throughout the book, each image is accompanied by an explanation of how it works, the story behind it – when it was discovered or who invented it first – and the details of exactly why it fools the human brain. The book includes many new and previously unpublished illusions, as well as new adaptations of lesser-known illusions. It also includes works by well-known illusion artists such as Bridget Riley, Salvador Dalí, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Oscar Reutersvärd, René Magritte, István Orosz and Rob Gonsalves. There are chapters on the following subjects: optical illusions from the real world (mirage, refraction, afterimage), ambiguous figures, impossible figures, color adaptation, moving illusions and paradoxical illusions.