Walking on Visual Illusions.

In nature, sensory and physical characteristics of the environment tend to match; for example, a surface that looks bumpy is bumpy. In human-built environments, they often don't. Here, we report observations from people exploring if mismatch between visual and physical characteristics affected their perceived walking experience.

Anomalous motion illusion contributes to visual preference.

This study investigated the relationship between the magnitude of illusory motion in the variants of the "Rotating Snakes" pattern and the visual preference among such patterns. In Experiment 1 we manipulated the outer contour and the internal geometrical structure of the figure to test for corresponding modulations in the perceived illusion magnitude. The strength of illusory motion was estimated by the method of adjustment where the speed of a standard moving figure was matched to the speed of the perceived illusory motion in test figures.

Aesthetic valence of visual illusions.

Visual illusions constitute an interesting perceptual phenomenon, but they also have an aesthetic and affective dimension. We hypothesized that the illusive nature itself causes the increased aesthetic and affective valence of illusions compared with their non-illusory counterparts. We created pairs of stimuli.