MODULE: Colour perception

Step 04 of 09: Subjectivity of perception

Having established that the human eye is quite imperfect in the Module: Anatomy of the Eye, we must concede again that human visual perception is susceptible to being tricked and that it is highly subjective. Colour, more than most visual phenomenon, is one of the most subjective experiences of the human perceptions of the world. It not only relies on visual aparatus that can be malformed, but as we are about to learn, colour-in-the-physical-world is constantly overruled by the visual cortex's impression of what it thinks should be out there.

This is the MUNSTERBERG Illusion, a simple geometric pattern that is wrongly misinterpreted to seem crooked and jagged. On closer inspection, line by line, it becomes apparent that the horizontal lines are actually perfectly level and not tilted in any way. What is occurring is the nature of the brightness of light impacting our perception of how large the object is. White naturally expands the space it occupies, often eating into the space of neighbouring dark elements, while black recedes or shrinks even in an identical occupation of space (ELSENDOORN, 1989). In this case this is occuring too with the neutral grey horizontal lines being interpreted as belonging to either the black or white boxes they neighbour, suggesting an incline that doesn't actually exist because they visually expand or contract the neighbouring box's space.

This is just a refresher as to the power of compositions to mislead even in monochrome before we begin adding colour...