Welcome back to the sixth

of these modules.
And today, we're going to be
talking about seeing geometry.
I told you a little bit in
the first of the sessions
about some of the anomalies in
the phenomenology of perceived geometry.
And I want to come back and remind you
about these to make it clear that again,
when it has a major problem
in relating perception to
the real world that any theory
of vision is obliged to explain.
So in the upper part of the diagram here,
are some classic examples that you see
in all, virtually all psychology books.
These effects are illusions,
as they're called.
Again, I always hesitate to use that
term because I want to remind you that
illusions is a dangerous idea.
We just see the world the way we do,
and the implication that
we sometimes see it right and sometimes
see it wrong is not a good idea at all.
Each of these are, are,
classically depicted.
They've been around since the early part
of the 20th century, or late 19th century.
They each have a name, and
let me explain them to you.
This is an effect that is attributed
to haring, the same you know,
the haring we talked about last time,
in the context of color reportantcy.
And what's apparent here is that
the two red lines that you see
are actually parallel in terms of
their physical presentation, but
when you see them super imposed
on an array of radiating lines,
the black lines, the, the two red lines.
Over parallel they look
bowed out in the middle.
This effect is called
the Poggendorff illusion and
the phenomenon here is that
the red line is co-linear.
That is it's the same line, but if you
look at the segment on the left, and
compare its position along the occluding
bar, the occluding black bar on the right,
it looks like the exit, from behind the
black bar on the right, this segment looks
a little bit higher than the entrance
of the collinear line on the left.
This phenomenon is called the T-effect or
the inverted T-effect and
we're going to come back to this and

talk about it in some detail.

The phenomenon here of interest
is that these two lines,
the red line and
the black line are identical in length,
that the red line looks to all of us to be
a little bit longer than the black line.
So I say we'll come back to that and
talk about that in some detail because in
many ways it's the simplest
one to discuss as an example.
This is perhaps the most
famous of these effects.
It's called the Muller Lyer effect or
the Muller Lyer illusion.
And again,
we'll have more to say about that later.
And this last one, well, the phenomenon
here I should I tell you is that
these again, the red lines are identical
in length, but when they're terminated by
arrows heads in or our tails I guess we
should call them in this arrangement.
Versus termination of the red line
by our heads in this arrangement,
that this red line looks to be
longer than this red line even though
again they're physically identical.
Last one is also well known
the Ponzo effect and the two red
lines here are again identical at length,
but the one that is
higher in the diagram here, looks longer
than the ones the, the ones that's nearer.
So all of these require explanation and
we're going to get to that.
I showed you this picture of the two
table tops in the first session,
and the reason I showed it to you was to
impress you that these effects could be
pretty striking, and phenomenon here,
is that the dimensions of the red and
green table tops are actually
physically the same, but
they certainly don't look that way.
And again you can do this with a ruler,
or go to the website that I'll
tell you about a little bit later, and
do an interactive measurement of these.
But when you rotate the red table 90
degrees, you'll see that the length
and breadth of the table tops are in fact,
identical.
And here is a little bit more dramatic
example of angles and their perception.
So in the picture above,
the angles look to be very different.
And this angle looks to be quite oblique.
This angle looks to be quite acute,
and so on for these other two angles.

They all look different in their subtense.

Remember the subtense of an angle is
just the measurement in degrees of
the angular distance
the two lines are apart.
But as the inset here shows you below,
these are actually all 90 degree angles
and [LAUGH] it's amazing but
that's the reality.
And again, you can take a protractor or
some other device and convince
yourself that this is really the case.
So as before when we considered
the phenomenology of
seeing lightness as
a function of luminance and
seeing color as a function of the
distribution of wavelengths, these are not
phenomena that are in any way easy to
explain in terms of let's say intuitions.
So, we'll take the Mueller-Lyer
effect just as an example.
So the fact that you know,
we're dealing here with arrowheads and
arrow tails and of course led
many people to think about how it
might be that some intuition
about what this is representing,
an arrow head versus an arrow tail,
might really mean, in human experience.
So one can think for example this kind
of a layout representing a corner
that's coming at you, and that you see
this kind of thing frequently in a room.
And this kind of arrangement being
a corner that's going away from you,
that's the kind of line being
more distant, here more proximal.
Then maybe that has
something to do with it.
Then maybe this effect
comes from the sort of,
unconscious perception of this as corners.
Well, it's easy to show that
that's not the case here, or
the same identical lines here.
so, this line and
this line are identical, and
this line, and this line are,
are identical.
But whether you terminate them
with circles or squares, or
whatever you terminate them with,
it doesn't make any difference.
And old shoe will do just fine,
however you terminate them,
the phenomena is still there.
So there's, there's no simple intuition
that would explain what's going on here.
And all of these stand as a,

a challenge to anybody who

wants to think they have a good idea about
how visual perception is really working.
One other thing I want to call
to your attention is that,
you may think, or again, this is kind of
an objection that equal of ray as well,
maybe these phenomena just because you're
seeing these simple diagrams on a piece of
paper or computer screen.
No that's not the case either.
So you can build for
example pieces of wood or
anything else you and I object.
And again, the reception of this line as
being shorter than this line, is apparent
in, in a real three dimensional object
that you put together of materials.
[INAUDIBLE].
Here in this picture in
the lower panel here,
it's actually in the lobby of the building
that we're recording this in.
And this is a,
a you don't have to go far to find
these phenomena in physical reality.
This is the Pogendorph effect again.
Remember we had there on the pluting
object black bar in the previous case,
and a co-linear line and
the railing here is obviously co-linear.
It's the same physical piece of stuff.
But even though you know all that,
the position of the segment,
relative to the [COUGH] vertical
distance along the post looks to be
a little bit lower here, and
a little bit higher here.
That's just what we saw in
the standard paper presentation, or
computer presentation of
of the Pogendorff effect.
So, again these effects are well known,
and lots of people have
busted their heads trying to explain
them in, in one way or another.
And there're lots of Ad Hoc
explanations of this, but
it stands as a real challenge to
figure out what's going on with
these various phenomenological
effects that I've just showed you.
So, remember the basic problem
that we've come across and
used thematically to introduce what seems
to be the best explanation of [COUGH]
this kind of phenomenology in the
perception of luminous i.e lightness and
the perception of [COUGH] of the
distribution of power in light spectrum,

i.e color.
In both those cases, the answer seem
to lie in getting around the obstacle
that I've referred to as the inverse
problem, and I just want to remind you,
I've told you this before, but I want to
remind you that the same basic problem
applies in geometry, as in these
other domains of visual perception.
So, you remember this diagram
that here the eye obviously and
here in the retina, the projection of
different objects in the real world.
These objects are of different sizes,
different orientations different
distances from the observer,
but they're all projecting in the same way
as an identical stimulus on the retina.
So size, distance, and orientation
are all conflated in the retinal image.
And this is a huge problem.
So, what is the significance
of an image feature?
We'll say a vertical line here,
projecting on the retina for behavior, and
it should be obvious from this that
these geometrical features
are inherently uncertain.
And [COUGH] the implication here
again as I've mentioned before,
is that we don't have any
way of getting around this
problem in,
in a sort of logical analytical way.
And that's the implication
of this kind of diagram.
That there's just no logical
solution to figuring out
what the meaning of the geometry
of a retinal image is,
in terms of what we have to
respond to in the real world.
So the question this raises is how is it
going to behave appropriately, because we
obviously do, in response to all kinds of
geometrical features and retinal images.
We respond to them appropriately,
in the real world,
but it's really hard to
see how we're doing that.
And as I said, there's no intuitive way
of I think, understanding the phenomenon
that I've told you, that would make
the explanation in any sense an easy one.