Before describing the rationale behind including each of these readings it is worth describing them as a group, and my general approach towards the selection of readings for this course. At first, this list may seem like an ambitious amount of reading for an undergraduate seminar. For each week, I have attempted to provide a clear and accessible review of that week’s illusions, as well as one or two brief experimental papers. I believe this approach will facilitate critical analysis, because it will give students first a general sense of that field, and then allow them to react to a single finding, and place that finding in the context of the field, as well as in the context of the themes of the course. The amount of reading may prove to be ambitious for these students, in which case, I am prepared to make some readings optional. The reading list below represents readings I will be prepared to present to the class for discussion, in some cases they will not be required to read each of these articles.
Furthermore, I have leaned away from comprehensive theoretical papers (in Psychological Bulletin and elsewhere) in favor of brief papers describing phenomena that will spur interest and discussion. I hope to cover the core content from each of these areas, but an equally important goal is to encourage the students to integrate what they learn each week with the themes of the course. For this reason, I have only included the seminal, classic paper when it is accessible.
Finally, I have included several useful web sites for each unit. The wealth of information on the world wide web is rarely sorted into appropriate and inappropriate, useful and frivolous, but it nonetheless offers a bounty of educational information at the students fingertips. I have acted as a filter for students in finding a few useful and sometimes fun web sites for each unit. These web sites also serve as a launching point for students more interested in the topic. In some cases, the topic at hand has a rich set of online documents and demonstrations.
Week
1: What is Illusion? Overview
The first set of readings has been selected to
provide a broad overview of the different kinds of illusions we will
address in this course. Each
reading presents the relevant illusions in the context of other
illusions in other fields, which will help students understand the
synthetic intentions of the course.
Gilbert, D.T. (1991). How mental systems believe. American Psychologist, 46, 107-119.
Spellman, B. A. (May 8, 1989). Fusion or illusion? [Letter to the editor on the similarity between the sciences of physics and psychology.] Newsweek, p. 8.
Wegner, D. Illusion of Conscious Will, Chapter 5: Protecting the illusion
Hoffman, D. (1998) Visual Intelligence. New York: Norton & Co.. (Chpt. 1: A Creative Genius for Vision)
This is an excellent and accessible
book on visual perception for the layman.
This first chapter sets the stage by showing the reader
how perception is constructed, and how many active processes involved. Your visual system is not
just passively taking in the world, but making decisions about what to
see, and how to see it. Hoffman
sets this stage by relating vision to art, language, and a host of
other related fields in a chapter brimming with insights from history.
Resources on
the Web
Introduction to Epistemology online http://www.galilean-library.org/int5.html
This
web site offers a layman’s introduction to epistemology, and
an opportunity for students to clarify and expand upon their notes from
my lecture. For the
student more interested in philosophy, it also offers a launching point
for other interesting related topics.
Epistemology
resources by a Yale Philosophy professor
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/e-page.htm
This
site is designed for the scholar, and many resources are available,
from online papers, to debates and discussions.
Descartes’
2nd Meditation (I think therefore I am) http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations/5.htm
The
original text (translation) which includes one of
philosophy’s most famous dictums.
Wikipedia’s
list of cognitive biases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Wikipedia
is an online encyclopedia in which anyone can contribute (but edited by
fact checkers). It
includes a surprisingly thorough and comprehensive list of cognitive
biases and illusions.
Week 2: Visual Illusions (Depth and
Space)
Cantril, H (1960) The Morning Notes of Adelbert Ames. New Brunswik: Rutgers University Press. (pp141-144)
This reading is Adelbert
Ames’ personal reflections and a lucid taxonomy of illusions. As he puts it:
“Manual-lack of correspondence between perceptual awareness
and `what’ is being looked at.”
It provides an excellent bridge between the philosophy and
empirical research on perceptual illusions.
Ittleson, W. (1968) The Ames Demonstrations in Perception. New York: Hafner Publishing Company. (pp81-92)
This will serve as an excellent introduction, because many students will be familiar with the famous Ames distorted room. A critical reading of the primary source and motivation for this demonstration will lead students to question what is really learned by such a demonstration of illusion. This section addresses both the distorted room and the bouncing ball demonstration.
Hoffman, D. (1998) Visual Intelligence. New York: Norton & Co.. (Chpt. 2: Inflating the Artist’s Sketch)
Another
interesting and accessible review by Hoffman, this time relating how
our visual system creates depth from the image on our two retinas. It also includes
a brief discussion of the history of art and perspective used in
painting.
Leibowitz, H.,
Brislin, R., Perlmutter, L., & Hennessy, R. (1969). Ponzo
perspective illusion as a manifestation of space perception. Science, 166(3909), 1174-1176.
In this
article, Leibowitz et al, test the notion that the ponzo (or railroad
track) illusion can be caused by the mistaken separation in depth of
the two lines. Participants
view the ponzo illusion in line drawings, photographs, and real life. The results indicate that
the size of the illusion varies with the “reality”
of the depth. The
authors conclude that illusory depth is instrumental in the perception
of the ponzo illusion.
Gregory, R. L.
(1965). Inappropriate constancy explanation of spatial distortions. Nature, 207(4999), 891-893.
This
paper outlines the argument that many visual illusions are due to an
inappropriate size constancy explanation.
In other words, our visual system is imputing
three-dimensional depth to these two dimensional pictures, thus
resulting in biases and distortions of these images.
Resources on the Web
Michael Bach’s page of
optical illusions: http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/index.html
An excellent page of
interactive optical illusions, both new and old.
A more commercial site, but still
some fun illusions: http://www.grand-illusions.com/index.htm
This is a commercial site, with an
online store of magical supplies and illusion trinkets, but it also
includes some interesting demonstrations of optical and physical
illusions.
Week 3: Visual Illusions (Time)
Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). "Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events." Perception, 28, 1059-1074.
In this modern classic paper, Simons and Chabris
describe an experiment which illustrates the large role that attention
plays in perception. Participants
were instructed to count a certain number of activities as they watched
a ball game on a screen. While
concentrating on this counting task, many did not notice a gorilla
enter and exit this ball game, walking across the areas of their visual
field in which they were concentrating.
McCloskey, M (1983) "Intuitive physics", Scientific American, April, pp114-123
Targetted to a general scientific audience, this
paper puts intuitive physics tasks in context.
Why should normal, high-functioning college students have
these striking misconceptions about the physics of the world, a world
in which they act and behave so successfully?
McCloskey, M & Carmazza, A (1980) "Curvilinear motion in the absence of external forces: naïve beliefs about the motion of objects", Science vol 210, pp1139-1141
This paper discusses the c-shaped tube problem in
intuitive physics. Participants
view a c-shaped tube laying flat on the table, and are asked to imagine
a ball rolling through the tube, and then out the other side. Many participants
mistakenly believe that the ball will continue to curve once it exits
the tube. McCloskey
and Caramazza propose that these participants hold an incorrect
Aristotelian impetus theory, rather than a Newtonian theory of forces.
Hecht, H., & Proffitt, D. R. (1995). The price of expertise: Effects of experience on the water-level task. Psychological Science, 6(2), 90-95.
This paper presents a novel explanation for the
water level task (in which participants misjudge the correct water line
on a tilted water glass). The
authors propose that this misjudgment is based on a perceptual bias
induced by experience with liquid in containers.
Students will find this a fun paper in which the
participants include beer maidens from Munich Oktoberfest and bus
drivers as a control group.
The effect
of animation on intuitive physics tasks is evaluated in this study. The authors find that the
incorrect performance on many intuitive physics tasks (like those in
the articles above) can be corrected by viewing an animation of
one’s response before one makes it.
This draws the distinction between what is known
consciously (available to memory or decision-making processes) and what
is “known” visually but not transferable.
Resources on the Web
Change Blindness Videos http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html
Dan Simons’ website
includes demos of the stimuli used for his change blindness papers.
Week 4: Other Sensory Illusions
– Tactile and Auditory
Hughes, H.C. (1999) Sensory
Exotica: A World beyond Human Experience.
MIT Press, Cambridge.
A
fascinating book which describes the sensory systems of other animals. This reading will
emphasize the subjectivity of our perceptions, and how other animals
see (and hear, and smell) the world differently than we do.
R. Shepard, (1964) Circularity in judgments of relative pitch, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 36(12), pp. 2346-2353
Demonstration and
discussion of a well-known auditory illusion, studied in Psych 230:
Introduction to Perception. While a bit technical, this article offers
students a chance to delve deeper into the explanations of a single
phenomena, and see what it means (in this case) for audition in general.
Kahneman,
D., Fredrickson, D.L., Schreiber, C.A., & Redelemeier,
D.A. (1993).
When more pain is preferred to less:
Adding a better end.
Psychological Science, 4, 401 - 405.
This is one of Kahneman’s
classic papers in which he demonstrates how pain is remembered and
experienced. Participants
preferred situations in which they had pain decrease at the end, as
opposed to where it just terminated abruptly.
In other words, for the final period, they preferred
decreasing levels of pain to no pain at all.
Howard IP, Howard A. (1994) Vection: the contributions of absolute and relative visual motion. Perception, 23(7). 745-51.
This is an experimental article evaluating the relative contributions of foreground and background objects in the sensation of vection (the illusory feeling of self-motion) Inspection of a visual scene rotating about the vertical body axis induces a compelling sense of self rotation, or circular vection. Circular vection is suppressed by stationary objects seen beyond the moving display but not by stationary objects in the foreground.
Ramachandran, V.S. (1999) Phantoms in the brain. Perennial, New York. selections
This book, while not as scientifically
rigorous as it should be, presents an interesting description of
phantom limb pain and its treatment.
Students will be encouraged to analyze and critique the
arguments put forward.
Resources
on the Web
Demonstrations of Auditory Illusions
http://www.kyushu-id.ac.jp/~ynhome/ENG/Demo/illusions.html
A Japanese web site with
many demonstrations of audio illusions
Web Site of Diana Deutsch (pre-eminent researcher on auditory illusions)
http://psy.ucsd.edu/~ddeutsch/
Diana Deutsch has many
interactive audio illusions on her web site as well.
Week
5: Developmental Illusions
DeLoache and colleagues demonstrate a phenomena known anecdotally by parents. Some young children attempt to perform size-inappropriate acts on toys. For example, they try to sit in a dollhouse chair, or ride in a matchbox-sized car. This illusion is presented in the context of the development of dual representations for perception and action.
In this paper, DeLoache and colleagues demonstrate how toddlers develop understanding of symbols. It is also a fun paper to read, with an ingenious experiment involving a supposedly shrinking room.
In this paper, the authors describe and elucidate the phenomena in which infants and toddlers manually explore depictions of objects. Objects of various levels of realism, from photographs to line drawings, are used and conclusions are drawn about the degree to which the participants attempt to grasp the images.
Beilin, H. (1992). Piaget's enduring contribution to developmental psychology. Developmental Psychology, 28, 191-204.
This paper presents a review of Piaget’s influence on developmental psychology, with some good descriptions of his various experiments and tasks.
Resources on the Web
The
Jean Piaget Society http://www.piaget.org/aboutPiaget.html
Week
6: Memory Illusions Pt. 1
Borges, J.L. (1942) Funes the Memorious in Ficciones ed John Sturrock trans Anthony Kerrigan 83-91
A
fascinating short story by a master of the craft.
This story briefly recounts the tale of Funes, who after
an accident has a perfect memory.
Unlike a photographic memory, Funes remembers absolutely
everything about everything. Borges
decribes how this is debilitating, and Funes wastes away, paralyzed by
his own thoughts.
Roediger, H.L. (1996). Memory illusions. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 76-100.
A review
of memory illusions of all kinds, beginning with a comparison to
perceptual illusions. The review
of illusions (both perceptual and
memorial) also includes some interesting historical notes. The references to
perception in this article will help bring some continuity to the
themes of the course.
A brief
review of memory illusions for a more general audience.
This article presents in greater depth (but still
accessible language) a few of the experiments from the previous review
article.
An
experimental paper concerned with the illusion of truth, in which a
statement which has been heard before (when its truth value was
unknown) is deemed to be more true than a newer statement, simply due
to its familiarity.
Jacoby et al (1989). Becoming famous overnight: Limits on the ability to avoid unconscious influences of the past. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 326 – 338.
An
experimental paper which shows how participants rate names as more
famous when they have heard them the previous day, but do not
consciously recall having heard them.
Whittlesea, B.W.A., Jacoby, L.L., &Girard, K. (1990) Illusions of immediate memory: Evidence of an attributional basis for feelings of familiarity and perceptual quality. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 716-732.
Experimental paper which proposes an alternate
explanation for some of the findings discussed above.
Resources on the Web:
Roddy Roediger’s web
page: http://psych.wustl.edu/memory/roddy1.html
Includes complete reprints page,
with full text of all articles.
Interactive demo of false memory: http://www.willamette.edu/~mstewart/nwacc/modules/falsemem.htm
A fun
demonstration of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott false memory paradigm.
Week 7: Memory Illusions Pt. 2
Reviews
experiments in which participants were shown doctored photographs (of
themselves) of events that did not occur, and were asked to describe
the event. Participants
often embellished with rich details, creating a complex false memory of
the event.
Loftus, E.F. (2003).
Make-believe memories. American Psychologist, 58,864-873
Very
accessible review on creating false memories, their characteristics,
and what their existence tells us about memory processes in general.
Loftus, E. F. (2003) Our changeable memories: legal and practical implications. Nature Reviews: Neuroscience, 4, 231-234.
This article provides context, and applications for
the research described in the articles above.
This should provide some interesting starting points for
discussion. While
students will easily be able to see for themselves that false memories
relate to eyewitness testimony, this article will help structure their
thoughts.
Hannigan and Reinitz (2001). A demonstration and
comparison of two types of inference-based memory errors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory and Cognition, 27, 931-940.
Resources on the Web
False Memory Syndrome Foundation http://www.fmsfonline.org/
An interesting web site dedicated to advocacy and
support of those who have suffered from damaging false memories.
Elizabeth Loftus’s web page http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/
Contains
many papers, and links to some of her books.
Week 8: Illusions of Judgment and
Rationality (Heuristics and Biases)
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974) Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124-1131.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 1981, 211, 453-458.
The two papers above are classics in the canon of
Kahneman and Tversky. They
are both brief and cogent descriptions of research on heuristics,
biases, and framing effects.
Gigerenzer, G. (1991). From tools to theories: A heuristic of discovery in cognitive psychology. Psychological Review, 98, 254-267.
This article presents a review of
Gigerenzer’s approach to decision-making.
His adaptive toolbox, and approach to
“ecological rationality” provide an excellent
counter to Kahneman and Tversky, especially in the view of the class
theme on the “usefulness” of these so-called
illusions.
Fischhoff, B. (1983). Predicting frames. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 9, 103-116.
Schwartz, B. (2004) The Paradox of Choice : Why More Is Less. HarperCollins Publishers Inc. New York. selections
Gilovich, T. (1993). How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: The Free Press. Selections
These two books above are written for the layman,
and excellent introductions to some of the work in human reasoning. A few chapters will be
assigned for their interest and applicability to the
students’ everyday lives.
Resources on the Web
Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel
Prize Lecture http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/2002/kahneman-lecture.html
This website has a complete streaming video of
Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize lecture.
It includes some lovely comparisons with visual illusions,
and a summary of past and recent work by Kahneman.
It also relates the research on rationality and decision
making with the work on pain (covered in Unit 4).
I also found it interesting as a successful presentation
of lecture with both video of the person and powerpoint slides.
Week
9: Illusions of Judgment and Rationality (Causality)
Hamilton, D. L., & Gifford, R. K. (1976). Illusory correlation in interpersonal perception: A cognitive basis of stereotypic judgments. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 12, 392-407.
This classic paper shows how people come to
associate a group with a behavior given the frequency of each, rather
than accounting for the relative frequencies.
One group is described more often, and with twice as many
positive behaviors as negative ones.
The other group is described half as often, but with the
same ratio of behaviors. The
second group is associated with negative behaviors.
McGill, A. (1989). Context effects in judgments of causation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 189-200.
This is an early paper examining the effects of
various types of context in judgments of causation.
Contextual factors which don’t have a actual
causal influence are found to nonetheless influence judgments of
causality.
Spellman, B. A. (1997). Crediting causality. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 126, 1-26.
This paper presents a new theoretical model for
looking at causality. The
author presents several new experiments, as well as explaining data
from previous experiments and anecdotes.
Morris, M., & Peng, K. (1994). Culture and cause: American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 949-971
The above two papers address the different
approaches to causality for different cultures.
The first paper reviews evidence from a variety of
sources, and the second presents experimental evidence of different
causal attributions among Chinese and American participants.
Jones, E. E. & Harris, V. A. (1967). The attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3, 1-24.
This is the paper in which the fundamental
attribution error is introduced. People
tend to overestimate dispositional explanations for other’s
behavior. People
read statements that were either pro- or anti-Castro, and told either
that the writer chose to write that, or had no choice.
When asked to predict the writer’s true
attitude, readers were influenced by the content, when they
shouldn’t have been.
Michotte, A. (1963). The perception of causality. New York: Basic Books. (selections)
Michotte addresses several forms of causality, and structures
Week
10: Social Illusions: Conscious Will
A brief review of the
evidence for the role that conscious will plays in causing our actions. The general thrust of this
article is that our feeling we are conscious causing our actions may be
an illusion.
A longer review of the
evidence for the illusion of conscious will.
This paper describes several experiments, as well as
reviewing some of the evidence in the broader paper above.
An experimental paper
which presents an illusion in which people believe they have control
over a situation in which they do not.
Libet, B. (1999) The Volitional brain: Towards a neuroscience of free will (edited collection)
Libet, B. (2004) Mind Time: The temporal factor in consciousness
Selections from these books will provide a more
brief and accessible account of the experiments originally described in
Libet’s seminal 1985 Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper. He showed that he could
measure a brain potential that preceeded the conscious intention of
moving a finger. This
set of experiments has given credence to the idea that conscious will
explains action, rather than causing it.
An experimental paper which describes the case of
patient P.S., who seems to have consciousness in both hemispheres. This paper also has a good
brief review of the relation between split brain and consciousness from
previous Gazzaniga papers.
Week
11: Social Illusions: Affective Forecasting
Gilbert, D. T., Lieberman, M. D., Morewedge, C. K.,
& Wilson, T. D. (2004). The peculiar longevity of things not so
bad. Psychological Science, 15, 14-19.
This paper discusses the counter-intuitive
phenomena in which an event of lower emotional power can have a longer
effect than a supposedly more powerful emotional event.
An effect which holds true for both for positive and
negative events, it is explained by the threshold of a psychological
immune system, which is not “activated” by these
lower valence events.
This paper discusses our bias in believing
that events will continue to exert a large emotional effect on us far
longer than they actually do. A
possible explanation given is that we do not take into account the
other events in our life that will contribute to our moods and emotions.
Wilson, T. D. & Gilbert, D. T. (in press).
Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want. Current
Directions in Psychological Science.
This paper presents an
accessible review of the evidence for affective forecasting.
Week
12:
The
Illusions of Being and Being There: Artificial Intelligence and Virtual
Reality
This paper presents
experiments in the perception of the vertical-horizontal illusion. The evidence shows that
the illusion is greater in real life than in pictures, and that the
size of this effect depends on the perceived size of the extent, not
the retinal angle. According
to this metric, the headmounted virtual reality display was able to
present a realistic-looking world, in that it invoked the same degree
of illusion seen in the real world.
Slater,
M., Usoh, M. and Steed, A. (1994) Depth of Presence in Virtual
Environments, Presence: Teleoperators and
Virtual Environments, 1994, 130 -144.
This
paper describes a study to assess the influence of a variety of factors
on reported level of presence in immersive virtual environments. It
introduces the idea of "stacking depth," that is, where a participant
can simulate the process of entering the virtual environment while
already in such an environment, which can be repeated to several levels
of depth. An experimental study including 24 subjects was carried out.
Half of the subjects were transported between environments by using
virtual head-mounted displays, and the other half by going through
doors. The analysis also showed a significant and positive association
with stacking level depth for those who were transported between
environments by using the virtual HMD, and a negative association for
those who were transported through doors. Finally, four of the subjects
moved their real left arm to match movement of the left arm of the
virtual body displayed by the system. These four scored significantly
higher on the kinesthetic representation system than the remainder of
the subjects.
This
paper uses the work of James J. Gibson to suggest that a manner of
evaluating presence and the reality of experience is how we act in
virtual environments. This
paper should remind the students of some of the discussion from the
first few weeks of visual perception.
Kurzweil, R. (1999) The age of spiritual machines: When computers exceed human intelligence. Penguin Putnam, New York.
This is a fantastic and compelling book laying out the possibility (probability in the author’s opinion) of computer’s surpassing human intelligence. Kurzweil is a fascinating character, a genius inventory whose prose leaps off the page. I cannot imagine this book failing to elicit controversial and interesting discussion.
Turing,
A. (1950) “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” Mind
59, 236, 433-60.
Alan Turing’s classic paper, evaluating
the issues in describing computing machinery and intelligence. Students will find it
absolutely incredible that this paper was writing in 1950, because many
of its insights are strikingly modern.
Resources on the Web
The Prize for the First Turing
Test: http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html
response
for the reason of the prize’s existence
http://loebner.net/Prizef/In-response.html
Alice AI foundation: http://www.alicebot.org/
Complete Turing paper online: http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.htm
Project reading list (incomplete):
Gallo, D.A. & Roediger, H.L. (2002). Variability among word lists in eliciting memory illusions: Evidence for associative activation and monitoring. Journal of Memory & Language, 47, 469-497.
Thomas & Loftus (2002). Creating bizarre false memories through imagination. Memory & Cognition, 30, 423 – 431.
Mazzoni and Memon (2003). Imagination can create false autobiographical memories. Psychological Science.
Bertamini M., Spooner, A., & Hecht, H. (2003). Naive optics: Predicting and perceiving reflections in mirrors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 29, 5, 982-1002.
Bertamini M., & Parks, T.E. (in press). On what people know about images on mirrors. Cognition
Watt, Stuart (1996) Naive Psychology and the Inverted Turing Test, Psycoloquy: 7,#14
Roediger, H.L., McDermott, K.B., Pisoni, D.P. & Gallo, D.A. (2004) . Illusory recollection of voices. Memory ,12,586-602.
Deutsch, D. The octave illusion in relation to handedness and familial handedness background. Neuropsychologia, 1983, 21, 289-293.
Deutsch, D. Auditory illusions and audio. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society , 1983, 31, 606.
Redelmeier and Kahneman (1996). Patients' memories of painful medical treatments: Real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures. Pain, 66, 3 - 8.
Wirtz et al. (2003). What to do on Spring Break: The role of predicted, on-line, and remembered experience in future choice. Psychological Science, 14, 520 - 523.
Loftus, E.F. (1993) The reality of repressed memories. American Psychologist, 48, 518-537
Langer, E. J. (1975). The illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 311-32