Frederick Kingdom is a professor at McGill University who has been studying human vision for over thirty-five years. He gained his B.A. at the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. at the University of Reading. In 1990, after postdoctoral research at the universities of Reading and Cambridge, he took up a faculty position at McGill, where he has continued to work until this day. His main research interests lie in the intermediate stages of human vision, encompassing color vision, stereopsis, texture perception, contour-shape coding, brightness, lightness, transparency, and the study of visual illusions. His preferred methodology is psychophysics, often incorporating the use of image-processed photographs of natural scenes.
Akiyoshi Kitaoka is a professor of psychology at the College of Comprehensive Psychology, Ritsumeikan University, Osaka/Kyoto, Japan. He extensively studies visual illusions, including geometrical (shape) illusions, lightness illusions, color illusions, motion illusions, and other visual phenomena, including visual completion and perceptual transparency. He also produces a variety of “illusion works” and exhibits them on his websites. His most popular creation is the Rotating Snakes Illusion, which he created in 2003 as an optimization of the Fraser-Wilcox Illusion.
Arno Koning graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 1999, and gained his Ph.D. in 2004 at the current Donders Centre for Cognition at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, with Dr. Rob van Lier, in the domain of 3-D object perception. Following a postdoctoral period at the University of Leuven (Belgium) with Professor Johan Wagemans, he has been a staff member of Dr. van Lier’s Perception and Awareness Lab at the Donders Centre for Cognition since 2008, as well as coordinator of the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Master Programme of the Donders Graduate School for Cognitive Neuroscience.
Lydia M. Maniatis learned almost everything she knows about vision by studying the work of the great Gestalt psychologists: Wertheimer, Köhler, Koffka, Arnheim, Kanizsa, Goldmeier, and others. She received her Ph.D. at American University in Washington, D.C., where, with great patience, Dr. Scott R. Parker helped her organize her thoughts.
Kazunori Morikawa is professor of psychology at the School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, Japan. He graduated from the University of Tokyo, then received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University. His research interests include visual illusions, face perception, memory, spatial cognition, and behavioral economics. He is especially interested in useful visual illusions that occur in our daily lives, such as illusions caused by clothing and cosmetics.
Ryan Mruczek received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brown University and completed his postdoctoral training at Princeton University and the University of Nevada, Reno. He is currently an assistant professor at Worcester State University. His research focuses on understanding how the brain efficiently processes sensory information in order to construct a functional representation of the outside world. He uses a wide array of methods in his work, including psychophysics, electrophysiology, and neuroimaging. His most recent work has explored the effects of motion dynamics on classic visual size illusions.
After receiving a Ph.D. in information physics and computing at the University of Tokyo, Masashi Nakatani worked for four years in the cosmetics industry, where he developed a sensor system that evaluates skin softness. He returned to academic research in the spring of 2012 and started a neuroscientific study of touch at Keio University in Japan and at Columbia University Medical Center, uncovering physiological characteristics of Merkel cells as a light-touch receptor in the skin. He is currently affiliated with Hokkaido University, where he conducts comprehensive studies of skin sensation, from cellular biology to human tactile perception.
Ken Nakayama is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Harvard University. From 1971 to 1990, he worked at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco. He received a B.A. from Haverford College and a Ph.D. from UCLA. He was a founder and the first president of the Vision Sciences Society. Professor Nakayama has worked on multiple aspects of visual perception, and is best known outside of academia for his contributions to the understanding of prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize familiar faces.
Kaia Nao is a pseudonym used for the graphic optical art of Joe Hautman, known for his paintings of wildlife. Hautman’s formal education is in the physical sciences. He earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Michigan in 1985 but turned his lifelong interest in art into a new career after winning a national art contest in 1991. His studies of the techniques of realistic painting led him to explore some of the optical illusions that he encountered unintentionally while painting. These studies led to a catalogue of images, under the name Kaia Nao, that were collected either because of their novel illusory effects or just for their beauty.
Roger Newport is a psychology lecturer at the University of Nottingham. In 2008, he invented a mediated reality system for manipulating vision of the hands in real time, for the purpose of stroke rehabilitation. While reassembling the equipment after moving labs one day, he was calibrating the camera by lining up his own right hand. Because the system was misaligned, his right hand was not where he perceived it to be, with the result that when he reached for a screwdriver in his left hand, just out of sight, he was astonished to find only empty space. This provided his inspiration for the Disappearing Hand Trick.
Ryosuke Niimi is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, Niigata University, Japan. He has studied various aspects of human visual cognition, such as object recognition, scene perception, attention, visual preference, and symmetry perception, through methods of experimental psychology and neuroscience.
Anthony M. Norcia is research professor of psychology at Stanford University, where he works on human vision and visual development. His research focuses on spatial vision, approached through neuroimaging, behavioral, and computational approaches. Before coming to Stanford, Norcia was a scientist at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco. He received his Ph.D. in physiological psychology from Stanford University and did his postdoctoral training at Brown University under Lorrin Riggs.
Kimberley Orsten-Hooge received her B.S. in psychology from the University of Houston-Downtown, her M.Sc. in cognitive neuropsychology from Oxford Brookes University, and her Ph.D. in psychology from Rice University. Her doctoral work on False Pop Out—a phenomenon in which identical items look different from one another and different items look identical to each other—stemmed from her interest in illusions and inspired the illusion A Turn in the Road. Her postdoctoral research at the University of Arizona continues to focus on perceptual organization phenomena and the influence of neural feedback on object detection.
Baingio Pinna has been a professor of experimental psychology and visual perception at the University of Sassari, Italy, since 1995. From 2001 to 2002, he received a research fellowship from the Alexander Humboldt Foundation in Freiburg, Germany, and was the winner of a scientific productivity prize at the University of Sassari in 2007. His main research interests lie in Gestalt psychology, visual illusions, the psychophysics of perception of shape, motion, color, and light, and the science of visual art.
James R. Pomerantz is a psychology professor at Rice University, having earned his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. from Yale. He has worked at Bell Laboratories, Yale, Johns Hopkins, SUNY Buffalo, and Brown University, where he was provost and acting president. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and served as president of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. His research deals with perceptual organization and emergent features in vision that make wholes different from the sums of their parts. His work on illusions includes the rubber-pencil illusion, the “grass is always greener” effect, and illusory pausing.
Sidney Pratt is a tobaccologist with twenty-five years of experience treating cigarette addiction. His studie
s have been with the Institute for Global Tobacco Control at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Quit Smart, and Duke University. He is currently negotiating a research project with the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Comprehensive Drug Research Center, Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami, the overall objective of which is to generate evidence in support of the efficacy of the “Pratt Blindfold” as an intervention for smoking cessation.
Catherine Preston completed a B.Sc. in psychology with neuroscience at the University of Leicester in 2004, and then a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Nottingham in 2008. She stayed as a postdoc at the University of Nottingham until 2010, when she took a position as temporary lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. In 2011, Preston moved to the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, where she won the Wenner-Gren and the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship. She started her lectureship at the University of York in 2015. Preston’s research interests focus on self-awareness and body perception, particularly in relation to clinical disorders and underlying neural mechanisms. She uses multisensory body illusions and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the perceptual and emotional malleability of the experience of the body in both the healthy and the abnormal brain.
Sergio Roncato was born in Noale, in Veneto, Italy. He received the Laureate in Sociology from the University of Trento in 1971. He has been a professor of general psychology and perceptual psychology at the University of Padua since 1982. His research interests include cognitive processes, knowledge representation, vision processes, art and perception, and optical-geometrical illusions. His experimental activity is mainly focused on the role of photometric factors (particularly the sign of luminance contrast) in perceptual organization.
Richard Russell is a perceptual psychologist. His research applies techniques and knowledge from vision science to answer questions about how we perceive people. A major focus of his research is the development of a biologically based account of makeup and other techniques of personal decoration. He has degrees from Pomona College and MIT, and has done research at Cambridge University, USC, Harvard, and the University of St. Andrews. He is on the faculty at Gettysburg College.
Gianni A. Sarcone is a bestselling author of educational books and a researcher in the field of visual perception and communication. He is the cofounder and CEO of Archimedes Laboratory Project, a consulting network of experts specializing in improving and developing creativity. Marie-Jo Waeber is the other cofounder, and Dr. Courtney Smith is the assistant manager. Sarcone’s work and research has been covered by major scientific and art magazines or news agencies, among them Scientific American, National Geographic Kids, New Scientist, CNN, Smithsonian, Focus (Italy), Query (Italy), Tangente (France), and Science & Vie (France).
Adrian Schwaninger is currently the vice-director of the School of Applied Psychology of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW).
Arthur G. Shapiro is an American vision scientist and co-editor of The Oxford Compendium of Visual Illusions. He is professor of psychology and chair of computer science at the American University in Washington, D.C. He is director of the Collaborative for Applied Perceptual Research and Innovation (CAPRI). Shapiro completed his undergraduate work in mathematics and psychology at UC San Diego, his Ph.D. in psychology at Columbia University, and his postdoctoral research in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on color, motion, vision in low-light environments, and visual phenomena. Shapiro’s research has been featured in news articles, television programs, and viral videos, including the television series Brain Games and a five-part series about illusions on CuriosityStream. Shapiro is a member of the “Nifty Fifty,” a group organized by the USA Science and Engineering Festival to promote the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields to secondary school students.
Daniel Simons is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, where he heads the Visual Cognition Laboratory. After receiving his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Cornell University, he spent five years on the faculty at Harvard University before moving to Illinois in 2002. His research explores the limits of awareness and memory. He is co-author, with Christopher Chabris, of The Invisible Gorilla, a book that explores our mistaken intuitions about how our minds work.
Pawan Sinha is a professor of vision and computational neuroscience at MIT, where he studies human visual cognition via experimental and computational approaches. He funded Project Prakash, a humanitarian program that uses visual neuroscientific advances to provide functionally blind Indian children with eyesight. In 2012, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
Victoria Skye is an illusion artist and a professional magician. She uses her talents from her magic, her previous mechanical-drafting career, and her woodworking background to create optical illusions, impossible objects, and puzzles. Skye’s award-winning art is published in numerous books and articles in the math, magic, science, and puzzle genres. Magicians and metagrobologists around the world collect her illusions.
Lothar Spillmann studied Gestalt psychology and single-cell correlates of visual perception at the universities of Münster and Freiburg. He was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, the Retina Foundation, and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston from 1964 to 1971, and the head of a psychophysics laboratory at Freiburg from 1971 to 2005. He cofounded the European Conference on Visual Perception in 1978. He has conducted studies of contrast, brightness, neon-color, watercolor, and movement illusions and their underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. With John S. Werner, he edited Visual Perception: The Neurophysiological Foundations and translated into English W. Metzger’s Laws of Seeing and M. Wertheimer’s On Perceived Motion and Figural Organization. He is currently a visiting professor in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
Hedva Spitzer received her B.A. in biology, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in electrophysiology, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She heads the Vision Research Laboratory in the School of Electrical Engineering at Tel Aviv University. The laboratory focuses on human perception and visual psychophysics, visual computational neuroscience, and derived algorithms for image processing and computer vision. Her research interests in recent years have focused on luminance, color, visual adaptation mechanisms, natural and medical high-dynamic-range images, textures, illusory contours, lateral facilitation mechanisms, chromatic aberrations and their applications to natural and medical image enhancement, segmentation, and classification.
Donald Alan Stubbs, Ph.D. (George Washington University, 1967), was professor of psychology and cooperating professor of art and new media at the University of Maine. Alan’s teaching included courses in experimental psychology, especially perception and learning, photography, and information design. Many of his publications are found at ResearchGate.net, and his career is described in “In Memoriam D. Alan Stubbs: 1940–2014,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 103, no. 2 (2015): 267–68. In addition to his work with illusions, such as “Dynamic Luminance” (also known as “Here Comes the Sun”), Alan had numerous photographs in juried shows. His final completed project documented sculptors and their sculptures for the Schoodic International Sculpture Symposia IV-V. Many summers, Alan volunteered his time and expertise in mentoring aspiring high school students in the Upward Bound Math Science Program at UMaine. Besides his passion for the visual arts, Alan loved music and was a “darn good drummer.”
Kokichi Sugihara received a Dr.Eng. in mathematical engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1980. He worked at the Electrotechnical Laboratory of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry of Japan, Nagoya University, and the University of Tokyo, and is now a professor at Meiji University. His research areas include computer vision, computational geometry, robust computation, computer graphics, and computational illusion. He found a method for realizing im
possible objects in a 3-D space without using traditional tricks, and extended the method to design new classes of 3-D illusions, such as impossible motion and ambiguous cylinders.
Kohske Takahashi is an associate professor at the School of Psychology at Chukyo University, Japan. His research covers broad topics in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including psychological, visual, and optical illusions. He is also interested in entomophagy. He has received several awards for his illusions, including second prize in the 2012 Illusion Contest in Japan and the first and tenth prizes in the 2013 Illusion Contest, also in Japan. He has a Ph.D. in informatics from Kyoto University.
Peter Thompson is a professor of psychology at the University of York, where he has held a position since 1978. In 1990, he was a U.S. National Research Council senior research associate, visiting NASA’s Ames Research Center. His interests and publications are wide-ranging, from low-level mechanisms of motion and orientation processing to face perception and visual aftereffects and illusions.
Dejan Todorovi´c is a member of the Department of Psychology at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. He holds a B.A. degree in mathematics from the University of Belgrade and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Connecticut. He spent time at Boston University, Rutgers University, the University of Toronto, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University (Germany). He uses psychophysical experimentation, computer modeling, and mathematical analyses to study the perception of various features of spatial geometry and achromatic color.
Peter Ulric Tse was born in 1962 in New York City. He studied physics and math at Dartmouth College from 1980 to 1984, then lived in Nepal, Germany, China, and Japan before beginning graduate school in cognitive psychology at Harvard University in 1992. From 1998 to 2001, he was a postdoctoral fellow doing fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) in Nikos Logothetis’s monkey neurophysiology lab at the Max Planck Institute. He has been a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth College since 2001, and lives with his family on what was once a farm in rural New Hampshire.
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