Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Motion perception is a fundamental component of biological vision, and contrast-driven motion illusions offer a particularly revealing window into its underlying mechanisms. These phenomena include reverse-phi motion, in which contrast polarity inversion leads to the perception of motion opposite to the physical displacement, and Mario-type apparent motion, where coherent motion is perceived in the complete absence of spatial displacement. Existing computational accounts often rely on explicit interactions between contrast pathways, yet provide limited insight into the temporal structure of such percepts. Here, we propose a computational model in which rebound-driven temporal dynamics play a central role in generating illusory motion. The model reproduces the characteristic non-monotonic dependence of perceived motion direction on temporal offset observed in psychophysical data. Our results suggest that contrast-driven motion illusions can arise from timing-dependent perceptual dynamics rather than explicit pathway coupling, highlighting the importance of temporal computation in motion perception. The code is available at: \url{https://github.com/NBELab/Cogsci2026}