Illusions of causality occur when people develop the belief that there is a causal connection between two events that are actually unrelated. Such illusions have been proposed to underlie pseudoscience and superstitious thinking, sometimes leading to disastrous consequences in relation to critical life areas, such as health, finances, and wellbeing. Like optical illusions, they can occur for an...

A subdivided path in the visual field appears longer than an empty path of the same length. This effect may be attributed to the division of the path into multiple segments, or to an influence of the visual elements used to mark the subdivision, and thus filling-up the estimated space. To address this question, we used two series of stimuli, in which the spatial distribution of the filling opti...

Anyone who has experienced change blindness (in which a large difference between two images goes unnoticed [1]) knows that while our brain is supposed to efficiently process the sensory inputs from our natural environment, it can be tricked by well-designed stimuli. In the visual system, this is best reflected by optical illusions in which two physically different stimuli appear identical. For ...

Linguistic illusions have provided valuable insights into how we mentally navigate complex representations in memory during language comprehension. Two notable cases involve illusory licensing of agreement and negative polarity items (NPIs), where comprehenders fleetingly accept sentences with unlicensed agreement or an unlicensed NPI, but judge those same sentences as unacceptable after more r...

3 The attributes of an optical illusion Optical illusions are meant to fool the mind. However, the way in which they do this differs with every illusion. Illusions can be classified based on their two main attributes of colour and geometry. One may think that the more attributes an illusion has, the better, but using all the attributes would upset the balance, making the illusion to confusing. ...