Every illusion has a backstage crew. New research shows the brain’s own “puppet strings”—special neurons that quietly tug our perception—help us see edges and shapes that don’t actually exist. When ...

An illusion is when we see and perceive an object that doesn't match the sensory input that reaches our eyes. In the case of the image below, the sensory input is four Pac Man–like black figures. But ...

Allen Institute researcher Jerome Lecoq points to one of the diagrams that was used in a study focusing on how the brain interprets optical illusions. (Allen Institute Photo / Erik Dinnel) Our brains ...

When animals move through complex visual environments, the brain cannot afford to analyze every detail one by one. Instead, it rapidly extracts the overall structure of the scene—for example, the mean ...

To what extent has Earth’s gravity shaped our cognitive and brain functions? Utilizing spaceflight and a ground-based analog, a new study shows that the human brain relies on bodily gravitational ...

I llusions are everywhere. For example, the moon appears larger when it rests on the horizon than when it is hanging in the sky. Other visual tricks occur when a person perceives an object in an image ...

Sounds can alter the way the brain interprets what it sees. This is the key finding of a new study by SISSA researchers in Trieste, published in PLOS Computational Biology. The research shows that, ...

An illusion is when we see and perceive an object that doesn't match the sensory input that reaches our eyes. In the case of the image below, the sensory input is four Pac Man–like black figures. But ...

How does the brain create mental images? A new study reveals that visual imagination and perception share a common neural code.

In the 1860s, physician Hermann von Helmholtz did a simple experiment to understand how the world stays still during eye movements. With a still head, he closed one eye and swiveled the other to look ...