Nijhawan R
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley 94720.
Percept Psychophys. 1991 Apr;49(4):333-41. doi: 10.3758/bf03205989.
Three-dimensional (3-D) variants of the Müller-Lyer pattern were created to address the question of where along the path of information flow in the visual system the illusion might occur. These variants, which yielded a robust illusion, included dihedral angles in place of the arrowheads of the classical pattern. The enormous difference in the shape of the resulting retinal image, compared with that of the classical pattern, makes it difficult to explain the present illusion by resorting to image-processing theories such as selective filtering (Ginsburg, 1984, 1986) or depth processing (Gregory, 1963, 1966, 1968). It was also shown that this 3-D illusion is homologous with the classical illusion, and that the two may thus share a common causal mechanism. A new type of 3-D figure, which yielded the same retinal image as did the classical pattern, was then employed. However, since the figure was 3-D, its shape in spatial coordinates was very different compared to that of the classical pattern. The magnitude of the illusion obtained with this figure was half that of the classical pattern. This finding suggests that the illusion might be caused by processes that occur after the computation of depth. All three experiments indicated that the illusion may be produced later in the processing stream than has previously been suggested.
创建了缪勒-莱尔图案的三维（3-D）变体，以解决在视觉系统信息流路径中的何处可能出现错觉这一问题。这些变体产生了强烈的错觉，其中用二面角代替了经典图案的箭头。与经典图案相比，所产生的视网膜图像形状差异巨大，这使得借助选择性过滤（金斯伯格，1984年、1986年）或深度处理（格雷戈里，1963年、1966年、1968年）等图像处理理论来解释当前的错觉变得困难。研究还表明，这种3-D错觉与经典错觉是同源的，因此两者可能共享一个共同的因果机制。随后采用了一种新型的3-D图形，它产生的视网膜图像与经典图案相同。然而，由于该图形是3-D的，其在空间坐标中的形状与经典图案相比有很大不同。用这个图形获得的错觉强度是经典图案的一半。这一发现表明，错觉可能是由深度计算之后发生的过程引起的。所有这三个实验都表明，错觉可能在处理流程中比之前所认为的出现得更晚。
