Howe Catherine Q, Purves Dale
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Box 90999, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 Jan 25;102(4):1234-9. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0409314102. Epub 2005 Jan 18.
The Müller-Lyer effect, the apparent difference in the length of a line as the result of its adornment with arrowheads or arrow tails, is the best known and most controversial of the classical geometrical illusions. By sampling a range-image database of natural scenes, we show that the perceptual effects elicited by the Müller-Lyer stimulus and its major variants are correctly predicted by the probability distributions of the possible physical sources underlying the relevant retinal images. These results support the conclusion that the Müller-Lyer illusion is a manifestation of the probabilistic strategy of visual processing that has evolved to contend with the uncertain provenance of retinal stimuli.
米勒-莱尔效应是指一条线因装饰有箭头或箭尾而在长度上出现的明显差异，它是经典几何错觉中最为人熟知且最具争议的。通过对自然场景的距离图像数据库进行采样，我们发现，米勒-莱尔刺激及其主要变体所引发的感知效应能够被相关视网膜图像潜在的可能物理来源的概率分布准确预测。这些结果支持了这样一个结论，即米勒-莱尔错觉是视觉处理概率策略的一种表现，这种策略是为应对视网膜刺激来源的不确定性而进化出来的。
