Research Article: Evolutionary Generation of Visual Motion Illusions

Visual illusions are a popular subject for entertainment, and they are also an active yet still mysterious research subject. There is no consensus on the mechanisms for many of the most popular illusions, and new types of striking visual illusions regularly "go viral" in social media. This contribution summarizes our research article, where we try to answer the question of why some static images appear to move (motion illusions) through the use of a prediction-based perception model coupled to a simple pattern generation algorithm. Our results support the hypothesis that illusory motion might be the result of perceiving the brain's own visual predictions, rather than perceiving raw visual input from the eyes. The philosophical motivation of this paper is to call attention to the untapped potential of "motivated failures", ways for artificial intelligence systems to fail as biological systems fail, as a worthy outlet for understanding the brain.