Optical Illusions Show How Animals Perceive the World

Greater bowerbird. Jim Bendon, via Wikimedia Commons. Distributed under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

Visual illusions remind us that we are not passive decoders of reality, we are active interpreters. Our eyes capture information from the environment but our brain can sometimes play tricks on us, making our perception differ from reality.

Scientists have used illusions to explore the psychological and cognitive processes that underlie human visual perception for many decades. More recently, evidence is emerging that demonstrates many animals, like us, can perceive and create a range of visual illusions. Understanding where these illusions arise in different brains could help us not only learn more about how we perceive our world but how other animals perceive theirs.

Read my story on animals and optical illusions at National Geographic: Which optical illusions can animals see?