Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Hollow-Face Illusion: Object Specific Knowledge, General Assumptions Or Properties Of The Stimulus, Harold C. Hill, Alan Johnston

Harold Hill

The hollow-face illusion, in which a mask appears as a convex face, is a powerful example of binocular depth inversion occurring with a real object under a wide range of viewing conditions. Explanations of the illusion are reviewed and six experiments reported. In experiment 1 the detrimental effect of figural inversion, evidence for the importance of familiarity, was found for other oriented objects. The inversion effect held for masks lit from the side (experiment 2). The illusion was stronger for a mask rotated by 90° lit from its forehead than from its chin, suggesting that familiar patterns of shading enhance …