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Ouchi Illusion


Ouchi illusion

The Ouchi illusion, illustrated above, is an illusion named after its inventor, Japanese artist Hajime Ouchi. In this illusion, the central disk seems to float above the checkered background when moving the eyes around while viewing the figure. Scrolling the image horizontally or vertically give a much stronger effect.

The illusion is caused by random eye movements, which are independent in the horizontal and vertical directions. However, the two types of patterns in the figure nearly eliminate the effect of the eye movements parallel to each type of pattern. Consequently, the neurons stimulated by the disk convey the signal that the disk jitters due to the horizontal component of the eye movements, while the neurons stimulated by the background convey the signal that movements are due to the independent vertical component. Since the two regions jitter independently, the brain interprets the regions as corresponding to separate independent objects (Olveczky et al. 2003).


See also

Checkerboard, Möbius Net

Portions of this entry contributed by Margherita Barile

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References

Ashida, H. "Spatial Frequency Tuning of the Ouchi Illusion and Its Dependence on Stimulus Size." To appear in Vision Research.Fernmüller, C.; Pless, R.; and Aloimonos, Y. "The Ouchi Illusion as an Artifact of Biased Flow Estimation." Vision Research 40, 77-96, 2000.Hine, T. J.; Cook, M.; and Rogers, G. T. "The Ouchi Illusion: an Anomaly in the Perception of Rigid Motion for Limited Spatial Frequencies and Angles." Perception & Psychophysics 59, 448-455, 1997.Mather, G. "Integration Biases in the Ouchi and Other Visual Illusions." Perception 29, 721-727, 2000.Olveczky, B.; Baccus, S.; and Meister, M. "Segregation of Object and Background Motion in the Retina." Nature 423, 401-408, 2003.Ouchi, H. Japanese Optical and Geometrical Art. New York: Dover, 1977.Seckel, A. The Art of Optical Illusions. Carlton Books, p. 15, 2002.

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Ouchi Illusion

Cite this as:

Barile, Margherita and Weisstein, Eric W. "Ouchi Illusion." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/OuchiIllusion.html

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