Close your left eye and stare at the +. Move your head closer to the screen and keep staring at the +, but pay attention to the dot. What happens? Explain why.

You need to know the structure of the eye to succeed! This eye structure tutorial from Sumanas might help.

The solution and loads more perception demonstrations can be found at Serendip’s playground.

Your biggest challenge is this one: “Explain the processing on visual stimuli, including edge enhancement and contra-lateral processing“.

So here are our class notes:

There are many more resources on the main page for this topic:

E2 Perception of Stimuli (including some cool links to illusions)

Here is Pawan Sinha talking about how the brain learns to see, and how we can help the children who are born blind in India. Find out more about Sinha’s work and Project Prakash at his university website (MIT).