Seeing around the corner: Occluded objects can be experienced as directly visible V Ekroll1, T R Scherzer2 |
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1Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium |
| We present a thought-provoking visual illusion in which portions of a scene are experienced as being both directly visible and occluded at the same time. In our experiments, subjects viewed an opaque disk with an open sector rotating in front of a background and indicated a) the perceived angular extent of the occluding disk sector and b) the perceived angular extent of the part of the background experienced as directly visible. In both cases, a static sector of adjustable angle was used for matching. While the perceived angular extent of the occluding disk sector corresponded to the physical extent of the stimulus, the perceived angular extent of the background region experienced as directly visible through the open sector in the occluder was clearly overestimated. Thus, the sectors of the circle experienced as directly visible and occluded sum to more than 360 degrees, which –like Escher’s well-known paintings – makes the total percept an “impossible figure”. To explain this seemingly paradoxical observation, we argue that the conscious experience of direct visibility is not a mental representation of physical visibility, but rather a representation of reliable sensory evidence: Functionally, this might be more useful than estimates about actual visibility. |
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