Contrast adaptation is specific to precisely localised edges, so that adapting to a flickering photograph makes one less sensitive to that same photograph, but not to similar photographs. When two low-contrast photos, A and B, are transparently superimposed, then adapting to a flickering high-contrast B leaves no net afterimage, but it makes B disappear from the A+B picture, which now simply looks like A.

When a display of red spots or hearts on a blue surround is moved around under dim light, the spots appear to wobble or flutter relative to the surround (the "fluttering hearts" effect). We explain this as follows: Rods and cones both respond to the hearts. Rods are more sluggish than cones, with a latency of ∼50 ms, and they are also much more sensitive to blue than to red (the Purkinje shift; Purkinje, 1825). Thus a red spot oscillating on a blue ground produces a double image: a light spot seen by the cones, followed by a trailing dark spot seen by the rods. These interacting spots of opposite luminance polarity move like "reverse phi" (Anstis, 1970) and this generates the fluttering hearts effect. We find that hearts flutter most markedly at or near mesopic equiluminance, when the red is lighter than the blue as seen by the cones, but darker than the blue as seen by the rods. These same red/blue luminance ratios give rise to two new illusions: the ghostly twin illusion, and the reversal of red/blue grating movement.

When a striped disk moves across a flickering background, the stripes paradoxically seem to move faster than the disk itself. We attribute this new illusion to reverse-phi motion, which slows down the disk rim but does not affect the stripes.

Rotating squares appeared to be distorted into pincushions with concave sides. These illusory shape changes were caused by a perceived compression along the curved path of motion.

Contour erasure is a newly established form of flicker adaptation that diminishes the saliency of object edges leading to their complete disappearance (Anstis, S. 2013. Journal of Vision, 13(2):25, 1-14). If these "disappeared" objects are then viewed on textured backgrounds, the observers experience filling-in, the illusory sense of background completion in the absence of physical input. In a series of observations, we demonstrate that contour erasure can greatly speed up the filling-in (or fading) of brightness. Based on these observations, we suggest that contour adaptation happens early in the magnocellular pathways.

When two adjacent surfaces move in step, this can generate a sensation of transparency, even in the absence of intersections. Stopping the motion of one surface makes it look suddenly opaque.

In this study, we present several demonstrations of color averaging between luminance boundaries. In each of the demonstrations, different black outlines are superimposed on one and the same colored surface. Whereas perception without these outlines comprises a blurry colored gradient, superimposing the outlines leads to a much clearer binary color percept, with different colors perceived on each side of the boundary. These demonstrations show that the color of the perceived surfaces is flexible, depending on the exact shape of the outlines that define the surface, and that different positioning of the outlines can lead to different, distinct color percepts. We argue that the principle of color averaging described here is crucial for the brain in building a useful model of the distal world, in which differences within object surfaces are perceptually minimized, while differences between surfaces are perceptually enhanced.

An orbiting ray pattern produces an unexpected gray disk. Here we demonstrate this visual effect and its possible insights into visual temporal integration.