Age Effects on the Perception of Motion Illusions

Abstract

Anomalous motion illusions represent a popular class of illusions and several studies have made an effort to explain their perception. However, understanding is still inconsistent. Age-related differences in susceptibility to illusory motion may contribute to further clarification of the underlying processing mechanisms. We investigated the effect of age on the perception of four different anomalous motion illusions. The Enigma illusion, the Rotating-Snakes illusion, the Pinna illusion, and the Rotating-Tilted-Lines illusion were tested on a total of one hundred and thirty-nine participants covering an age range from 3 to 82 years. In comparison with young adults, children showed a lower likelihood of perceiving motion in all illusions with the exception of the Rotating-Tilted-Lines illusion. For adult subjects, we found significant age effects in the Rotating-Snakes illusion and the Rotating-Tilted-Lines illusion: occurrence of the illusory effect decreased with age. The other two illusions turned out to be unaffected by aging. Finally, intercorrelations between different motion illusions revealed that only the Pinna illusion and the Rotating-Tilted-Lines illusion correlated significantly with each other. The results confirm that anomalous motion illusions should not be considered as a homogeneous group. Possible links between perceptual data and neurophysiological changes related to age are discussed. Perceptual differences due to age provide the opportunity to improve our understanding of illusory motion and point to specific underlying mechanisms.

Halt and recovery of illusory motion perception from peripherally viewed static images

“…By contrast, the streaming in the Enigma illusion did not apparently decrease, and the Ouchi illusion was even enhanced by adding smooth motion. The present results, showing differences in the time courses of perceived motion in the illusions, are consistent with the previous results (Billino et al, 2009;Tomimatsu et al, 2010).…”

“…They suggested that the direction of the perceived motion is from black, to dark gray, white, and light gray-a luminance profile that, for example, produced the "Rotating Snakes" (Kitaoka, 2003) illusion. Studies have quantitatively confirmed that the motion in this illusion appears more in peripheral vision (Beer, Heckel, & Greenlee, 2008;Hisakata & Murakami, 2008) and that the illusion is weaker for senior observers (Billino, Hamburger, & Gegenfurtner, 2009). One characteristic common to both the FW illusion and the modified FW illusion is that steady fixation weakens the illusory motion, and eventually halts it within several seconds.…”

“…In view of these results, we guess that the illusions produced by Fraser and Wilcox (1979) and Kitaoka and Ashida (2003) are more directly affected by the progress of adaptation to luminance gratings. Billino et al (2009) showed that the "Rotating Snakes" illusion is strongly affected by aging and suggested a contribution of some specific physiological process. They demonstrated that there is no correlation between the "Rotating Snakes" and Enigma illusions in their probabilities of occurrence.…”

The Effect of Aging and Attention on Visual Crowding and Surround Suppression of Perceived Contrast Threshold

“…Similarly, center-surround contextual effects such as the tilt illusion are also altered in older adults. 37 The majority of these studies were performed with central fixation rather than in the parafovea as here. The parameter space for exploring these types of perceptual phenomena is very large, and the mechanisms of some effects are more established from a neurophysiologic perspective than others.…”

Do Fish Perceive Illusory Motion?

“…In particular, there is considerable debate among investigators as to whether gaze instability is strictly necessary to the illusory motion perception or, rather, if fixational eye movements only improve the strength of the illusion. Interestingly, not all subjects report perceiving illusory motion2223. The origin of this polymorphic response is not entirely clear, but Fraser and Wilcox22 reported a significant parent-offspring correlation in the response to a motion illusion indicating either a genetic causation or a common environment effect.…”