UC San Diego

Multistable visual illusions have been utilized by artists for hundreds of years, fascinating many people by the seemingly random ways that their perception can shift even when the stimuli they are viewing remain constant. Rather than being completely random, there are specific points at which people are more likely to perceive changes when viewing multistable stimuli, such as the Kinetic Depth Effect (KDE) silhouettes used in the following experiments. This allows us to use KDE stimuli as a tool to explore the visual system to determine the properties of those stimuli which result in non-random perceptual rotation reversals. These properties can then give us insight into the inherent biases that may exist in the way that our brains process visual information