Emmert's Law and the moon illusion.
A cognitive account is offered of puzzling, though well known phenomena, including increased size of afterimages with greater distance (Emmert's Law) and increased size of the moon near the horizon (the Moon Illusion). Various classical distortion illusions are explained by Size Scaling when inappropriate to distance, 'flipping' depth ambiguity being used to separate botton-up and top-down visual scaling. Helmholtz's general Principle is discussed with simpler wording - that retinal images are attributed to objects - for object recognition and spatial vision.
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1TN, UK. Richard.Gregory@bristol.ac.uk
Richard L
RL
Gregory
D003198:Computer Simulation; D003867:Depth Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007088:Illusions / Q000502:physiology*; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D016081:Moon