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Next Decoding Academia Article: Amir, D., & Firestone, C. Is visual perception WEIRD? The Müller-Lyer illusion and the Cultural Byproduct Hypothesis.
🕑 Added 2025-04-18 21:04:01 +0000 UTCNext week, we will examine a paper that sparked a minor academic storm by questioning the widely held belief that culture strongly shapes how people perceive the Müller‑Lyer illusion.
The paper in question is : Amir, Dorsa & Firestone, Chaz (forthcoming). Is visual perception WEIRD? The Müller-Lyer illusion and the Cultural Byproduct Hypothesis. Psychological Review.
It is attached to this post if you would like to play along.
Comments
Linda Sears
This paper also made me wonder about other sensory illusions besides visual ones. I thought it was very cool that they did the braille version of the illusion.
Linda Sears
I skimmed over this last night. The part that really stuck out for me was the Kahneman quotation about are inability to change what we see even when we know it is an illusion. It made me think about other aspects of reality that we’ve rationally or scientifically learned are true, yet it is difficult not to experience them as how it feels to us. I’m thinking of knowing that our planet is spinning on its axis and is moving around the sun through space. It is hard to believe this since I don’t feel like I’m moving, and we will still talk of the sun rising and falling.
CrystalJade
Novelty is important when it comes to matters of perception. I always found illusion to be quite interesting. Especially for sensory integration involving multiple inputs. The rubber hand illusion was my favourite, so I picked this one to write an essay about in the cognitive course in my masters. Should be interesting. My gut feel says that there are likely different mediators of weird bias according to the subject matter. Of course the elephant in the room with weird bias is IQ which has a history of devolving into being about something entirely different.
