ID No.: 2000HZ67005
NAME OF THE STUDENT: Vinod Kumar. U
DISSERTATION TITLE: Visual Illusions: The Significance of Context
ABSTRACT
Over the past forty years, research in vision has given us a fairly good understanding of the visual mechanisms that govern visual perception. All the way through, visual illusions have proven to be very useful in delineating the structural dynamics of vision. Most of them were designed by the Gestalt psychologists to highlight the significance of context. Eventually, contextual manipulations became a key methodological strategy in vision research. The major thrust of the neuroscientific research in the area of vision is to establish an isomorphism between the context- dependency of vision, and the dynamic properties of the visual system. Researchers identified a possible locus in the visual system to account for this isomorphism. The receptive field properties of long-range connections of pyramidal cells seem to be a plausible candidate structure to expound the context-dependency of vision. Context-dependency is evident in the three presumed levels of visual processing-low-level, mid-level and high-level. Illusory percepts like Zollner tilt, Kanizsa triangle and Dalmatian roughly reflect these three levels respectively. Hence these levels of processing are used as a criterion to propose a categorization schema for visual illusions that could be of potential use in future vision research.
