On mathematical illusions

Overdistribution Illusions

Overdistribution is a form of memory distortion in which an event is remembered as belonging to too many episodic states, states that are logically or empirically incompatible with each other. We investigated a response formatting method of suppressing 2 basic types of overdistribution, disjunction and conjunction illusions, which parallel some classic illusions in the judgment and decision mak...

Auditory Illusions

A Note on Spectral Illusions, &c.

In the last number of tlie Journal of Psychological Medicine there is an article by Dr. W. A. F. Browne, a well known and much respected authority, on " Second-sight, or Deuteroscopia." To write a criticism, or commentary, on the article is no part of my present purpose. Indeed, fascinating as the subject is, I should not have been tempted to meddle with it at all but for one of the anecdotes r...

On the Difficulty of Mending Metacognitive Illusions

Interleaving exemplars of to-be-learned categories—rather than blocking exemplars by category— typically enhances inductive learning. Learners, however, tend to believe the opposite, even after their own performance has benefited from interleaving. In Experiments 1 and 2, the authors examined the influence of 2 factors that they hypothesized contribute to the illusion that blocking enhances ind...

On Brightness Illusions as Optimal Percepts

We show that Mach bands and a number of other low-level brightness illusions can be accounted for by assuming that the perceptual system performs simple Bayesian inference using a Gaussian image prior with noisy retinal gangion cells. This theory accounts for phenomena which have proven problematic for simple energy-based and lateral-interaction models while avoiding the complexities of mid-lev...