Let me turn now to the strange

way that you see things, and

as I say this is to get you
to involved and interested in
the odd relationship between what
we see and the physical world.
So let me begin with [COUGH]
our perception of luminance.
Luminance is defined as
a physical measurement that
can be expressed in candelas per meter
square, and it's what your otometer and
your in your digital camera or
phone, represents to you.
And it is as I said before a physical
measurement of light in, in, intensity.
It's adjusted for, aspects of human
vision would make any sense to consider.
The intensity of light
from those wavelengths of
light that we're not responsive to.
So it's a human definition in that sense.
But it's a physical parameter.
That physical parameter generates
in us the perception of lightness.
So when we see a surface,
we judge it to be lighter or
darker than some other surface.
That's the perceptual consequence or
perceptual associate of luminance.
So this video demonstration here
you may well have seen before.
It's common in, in textbooks in
psychology that you've probably seen if
you've taken an undergraduate course, and
the luminance of these two grey
patches is physically identical.
So if you measure them with a photometer,
you get the same reading for
this one as this one, and
indeed, absent any context for
presenting them on the same background,
they look identical.
It doesn't mean that the context
doesn't have an effect.
But at least if they're in the same
context, they look, the same.
Now, let's look at what happens to
these physically identical patches when
you put them in different context.
So these are exactly the same patches with
exactly the same luminance as before.
But now the one that's in
the dark surround looks brighter,
not a great deal brighter but it's lighter
or brighter depending on whether you're
talking about a surface or
a light source we'll come to that later.
Then the same physical patch
in a lighter surround.

Which looks a little bit darker.

So this one looks darker than this one.
And the question is why.
We're going to come back to this
several times in the course,
and explain in the simplest
case what's going on.
But, again, today we're just
doing the to get you engaged in
thinking about the strange
way we see things.
I think it's one thing to see these on
a computer screen, or in a textbook.
It's quite another to make them for
yourself and,
to convince yourself that that's really
the way we see stuff in the world.
So I urge you to get, you can take
this from pieces of paper that you've
found lying around, but get a piece of
dark paper, something like this size, and
a similar piece of lighter paper, and
cut out a couple of little squares,.
Of a different gray.
And what you'll see that when we
place the gray on the dark surround,
and then take the same piece of gray
paper and place it on a light surround.
You'll see that they look different, so
again this is not something that you can't
demonstrate for yourself very easily,
and I find that at least very impressive
to do so, and you could of course
move these back and
forth and see that any place
those squares on the same surface whether
the dark surface or the light surface.
They again will look the same to you.
So, you might say in the example
that I've just shown you,
well, the difference is not very much and
maybe it's just a self trivial side
effect of the imperfections of biology,
which certainly is imperfect
in a whole variety of ways.
But it's pretty clear that that's
not the case in a demonstration like
this that shows you why.
So I want you to concentrate on your
subjective impression of the lightness
of this region of the scene and
this region of the scene.
This region of the scene and,
this region of the scene.
And of course they look very
different to everybody; who've used
a stimulus like this.
This one, okay,
much lighter than this one.
This one, if you,

much darker than this one.

So what happens when you take away
the context, well when we do that.
What you see is that these
different appearances of
seeing something that's approaching
black on the one hand and
white on the other hand,
are actually coming from stimuli from
patches from regions of the surface that,
absent the context.
Look the same and
in fact are the same, these have
exactly the same luminescence values.
All of these have the same physical
luminescence value, but they,
look different and that difference appears
as quickly as I can take on or take off.
The mask, this is not some gradual a,
adaptation.
This is an instantaneous
difference in perception,
which will be quite, quite phenomenal.
So you, you can't say well, okay,
you see thing a little bit strangely, but
it's in some sense trivial.
No, it's not trivial at all.
I mean black and white or
the opposites, and
this is coming pretty close to
a realization of those opposites.
So, I show you this example,
because I think it's also important
to recognize that there's no simple,
intuitive explanation for these phenomena.
So, again,
we're going to come back to these issues,
I'll show all of these to you, and
we'll go into them in more detail.
But in this case you see this region and
this region again as a darker and
a lighter surface.
But here, the difference in this is
being generated by this little edge.
It has a name, the Cornsweet edge, which
we'll talk about, and we'll talk about.
That that edge is here.
But now, for today,
it's sufficient just to recognize that,
if we mask out that edge, instantly, the
apparent difference between the upper and
lower surface, the luminants, is the same,
but the perception that you have
of the upper and lower surface is
instantaneously changed, and again,
that change happens as quickly as I
can take on or take off the mask.
Well you might say that, okay,
this has to do with luminance.
Luminance as we'll go into later,

is the fundamental.
Aspect quality of visual
perception about which we
really don't have vision at, at all.
You might say well does this apply
to other qualities that we see,
does it apply to color for example?
Does it apply to geometry,
does it apply to motion?
The answer is yes and
I'm going to show you some other
examples that make that clearer.
So here is an example in color.
I want you to consider your
color perception of these two
little chicklets on
the surface of the cube.
This one, if you have normal color vision,
and I assume most of you do, and
that's a subject we'll talk about later,
looks orangy and
this one looks like kind
of a rich chocolaty brown.
But if I mask out
the information in the scene,
you can see that these are actually
coming from the same color stimulus.
And we'll talk about
this in much more detail.
It's a little bit more
complicated than I'm making out.
But.
You see these colors as different coming
from the same physical stimulants.
Again, as quickly as I can take on or
add on
the information that's coming
from the context in this scene.
So, certainly, the strange phenomenology
of the colors that we see,
it's not that they're just given
by the physical reality of
what's out there, it's,
determined in some strange way by,
the context, and of course,
this all has to do with our brain.
It's processing information and
retinal stimuli.
Let's look at another quality, geometry.
And here's a case where there
are many many examples that I think I
could use to convince you that the way
we see geometry doesn't correspond.
In any simple way to the way
that we will use protractors and
other geometrical measuring instruments
tell us the world is really constructed.
So in this case the dimensions
of the green table top and
the dimensions of the red table top.

Are actually the same.

But they look, when presented in a context
like this, they look very different.
And this is something you can go
to a website I mentioned to you,
riverslab.net and do this for
yourself interactively.
But if you rotate the red
table 90 degrees.
You'll see, and
you can use a ruler to apply it to these
as you see them on the screen here.
These dimensions are the same length and
breadth even though they
look dramatically different.
Here's an example in angles, and
again you can do this with simple stuff,
you can take a coat hanger and
bend it into a right angle
Presented in the ways that these things
are presented in this pictorial scene.
Each of these angles looks very different,
but in fact,
each of these angles that look.
In this case, acute, in this case, obtuse,
intermediately these other two instances.
Each of these angles are really
ninety degree angles.
Again, you can go on
the Lab.net website and
look at this interactively and
play with this.
That I think just looking at
this should convince you that,
again the way we see angles doesn't
correspond in any simple way to
the measurements that we
would make with a protractor.
And finally I want to show you this
phenomenon in the case of motion.
You're looking at a blank screen here but
soon you're going to see a white line
moving across the screen from off
to the right in this direction.
And what's going to happen
is that you'll foresee it
without a context just the line
itself with both ends visible.
We're going to cross the stream.
And it will certainly appear
to you in direction, as,
I guess it's moving from
the left to the right.
And apertures will, be applied.
Circular peephole, so that you see the
same line, moving through the aperture.
And now instead of seeing
it moving left to right,
going to be seeing it shift a number of
degrees, not just a couple of degrees,

you're going to be seeing it shift

a significant number of degrees, so
that it's moving down in your perception,
downward, and to the right.
So, let's look at that.
Now I'm moving across, left to right.
You see it moving left to right.
Now the same line, exactly the same line,
but you see it moving
[COUGH] through an aperture.
And now the direction has gone from
left to right, to downward and right,
changing its apparent direction
by perhaps 30, 40 degrees or so.
Let's look at that, again.
Left to right.
Line moving.
Same line moving through a, an aperture.
Exactly the same line
moving left to right,
but now you see it moving downward and
to the right.
So, it should be obvious from
all of these examples that
even though we behave successfully
in the world, we obviously do.
We make mistakes, but in general we
wouldn't be here to have, be having this
conversation if it weren't the case
that we behave as if we knew physical
reality pretty well because we navigate
and deal with objects in the world.
More successfully even though we
clearly as these examples I was
showing you indicate we don't
see the world in that way.
Let me just disabuse you I'm sure many of
you may be thinking well
aren't these just illusions?
Meaning that oh yeah we usually see the
world in the way it really is physically
but once in a while whether it's
psychologists or a psychophysicist,
or a neuroscientist,
cooks up some tricky stimulus.
And that the ones that I showed you maybe
fall in the category, tricky stimuli that
don't represent the way we're
seeing things on an everyday basis.
But that's, really the wrong idea.
Completely the wrong idea.
These things that I've just shown
you are no illusions at all,
you can see that we, in reality you
do see them in reality all the time.
This is the way that we see
stuff in the world, and
there is really no such thing as
an illusion in the sense that,
oh we sometimes,

make mistakes in what we see and

most of the time, we're seeing things
as they really are in physical reality.
No it's always the case that we're
seeing stuff disconnected in,
in the sense that I would tell you
about for in physical reality.
So the question that we
have to ask here is.
Why is our perception so misleading with
respect to physic, physical reality?
Why is vision evolved to
do this strange business of
making us see stuff that doesn't
really correspond to reality?
What's, what's, what's going on?