Previous studies have shown individuals to holdpositive biases about their relationships. The present study examined positive illusions about a partner’s specific personality characteristics in relation to relationship quality and personality. Both partners of 120 heterosexual couples participated in the present study, making it possible to examine both partner and actor effects. Results showed...

The still-radii illusion, the figure-of-eight illusion, the band-of-heightened-intensity illusion and the dark-blurred-concentric-circles illusion have remained, until now, isolated relatively ill-explained phenomena. A single algorithmic model is proposed which explains these four visual illusions. In fact, this model predicts phenomena produced by motion of any gray-shaded patterns relative t...

A patient with left hemispatial neglect, while completely unaware of features on the left side of figures, nevertheless perceived geometric illusions dependent on these features. Bisection errors were amplified not only by increasing line length, but also by perceived line length induced by these illusions. Bisection of Judd illusion figures was as much influenced by neglected features on the l...

We examine semantic illusions from a dual-process perspective according to which the processes that go into failing or succeeding to detect such illusions can be decomposed into controlled processes (checking the facts in the sentence against the information in memory) and automatic processes (the impression of truth that comes from the semantic associations between the elements in the sentence...

Many phenomena that we take for granted are illusions - color and motion on a TV or computer monitor, for example, or the impression of space in a stereo music recording. Even the stable image that we perceive when looking directly at the real world is illusory. One of the important lessons from sensory neuroscience is that our perception of the world is constructed rather than received. Sensor...

It is a common assumption among both philosophers and psychologists that having accurate beliefs about ourselves and the world around us is always the epistemic gold standard. However, there is gathering data from social psychology that suggest that illusions are quite prevalent in our everyday thinking and that some of these illusions may even be conducive to our overall well being. In this pa...

The lightness of a visual surface is its perceived achromatic reflectance [Adelson, E. H., (2000). Lightness perception and lightness illusions. In M. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The new cognitive neuroscience (2nd ed.) (pp. 339-351) Berlin: Springer; Gilchrist, A. (1999). Lightness perception. In R. W. F. Keil (Ed.), MIT encyclopedia of cognitive science (pp. 471-472). Cambridge: MIT press]. Lightness ra...