A rotating disk composed of alternating light and dark segments may give rise to the wagon wheel illusion: a perceptual reversal in rotation direction. Continuously illuminated (eg in daylight) as well as discretely presented (eg stroboscopic or computer-animated) versions of the illusion exist; here, we investigated the discrete version. Prominence of the illusion is commonly believed to depen...

Howe (2001) presents a new variant of White's illusion and asserts that it demonstrates the failures of a number of models of White's illusion, including my own (Anderson 1997). He also argues that the FACADE model of Grossberg can explain this effect, as well as the other published variants of White's illusion (Grossberg 1997; Kelly and Grossberg 2000). My response has two parts. First, althou...

The severe global economic downturn and the large stimulus programs that governments in many countries adopted in response have generated a resurgence in research on the effects of fiscal policy. One key lesson emerging from this research is that there is no single fiscal multiplier that sums up the economic impact of fiscal policy. Rather, the impact varies widely depending on the specific fis...

The authors describe a new visual illusion first discovered in a natural setting. A cyclist riding beside a pair of sagging chains that connect fence posts appears to move up and down with the chains. In this illusion, a static shape (the chains) affects the perception of a moving shape (the bicycle), and this influence involves assimilation (averaging) rather than opposition (differentiation)....

The amplitude of saccadic eye movements is affected by size illusions such as the Müller-Lyer illusion, but this effect varies highly between studies. Here we examine the origin of this variability by testing the influence of three temporal factors on the effect of the Müller-Lyer illusion: presentation time, response delay, and saccade latency. Subjects performed reflexive saccades, deferred s...

In the "rubber-hand illusion," the sight of brushing of a rubber hand at the same time as brushing of the person's own hidden hand is sufficient to produce a feeling of ownership of the fake hand. We shown previously that this illusion is associated with activity in the multisensory areas, most notably the ventral premotor cortex (Ehrsson et al., 2004). However, it remains to be demonstrated th...

Fiscal decentralization has been a fundamental aspect of China’s transition to a market economy, and the country has made substantial effort to break down its highly centralized fiscal management system with various forms of fiscal contracting systems (1978-1993) and later a tax sharing system (1994present). This paper is aimed to provide a comprehensive review of China’s experience in fiscal d...

Due to the complex nature of fiscal policy decisions and implementations, fiscal vector autoregressive models have suffered from an underidentification problem that has caused substantial debate about measuring the efficacy of fiscal stimulus. To help resolve this issue this paper incorporates additional information regarding how private agents’ anticipation of fiscal adjustment in the short an...