PSYCH 1XX3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Subjective Constancy, Ponzo Illusion, Ames Room
Document Summary
Although our brain is tuned to recognize a variety of objects in different situations, sometimes it makes mistakes. The reason these illusions occur is because our perceptual strategies, which work most of the time, are used in these particular situations where, in fact, they don"t belong. We think we see one thing when, in reality what we"re looking at is something quite different. Many of our perceptual constancies can be overcome by simply by removing the relevant contextual information. Example: if we place our dog with the reddish cast in a scene in which no other objects have a reddish cast then we would fail to recognize the dog as our own. Most people will swear that the line on the top is longer than the line on the bottom, when in fact both lines are exactly the same length. One explanation of this illusion is that it is an example of misapplying size constancy and inaccurately interpreting depth.
