Despite the long-standing interest within the fields of visual perception 2– 4, consciousness science 5, 6, and psychiatry 7– 10, several important issues remain open. They eloquently show that our brains did not evolve to be perfect perceptual devices providing veridical accounts of physical reality, but integrate prior knowledge and contextual information - blended together in our subjective conscious experience 1. Visual illusions are fascinating stimuli capturing a key feature of our neurocognitive systems.

Moreover, we report a positive link between illusion sensitivity and personality traits such as Agreeableness, Honesty-Humility, and negative relationships with Psychoticism, Antagonism, Disinhibition, and Negative Affect. Our results provide evidence in favour of a general factor underlying the sensitivity to different illusions (labelled Factor i). We tested the objective effect of the illusions on errors and response times, and extracted participant-level performance scores (n=250) for each illusion. In this study, we used a novel parametric framework for visual illusions to generate 10 different classic illusions (Delboeuf, Ebbinghaus, Rod and Frame, Vertical-Horizontal, Zöllner, White, Müller-Lyer, Ponzo, Poggendorff, Contrast) varying in strength, embedded in a perceptual discrimination task. Unfortunately, important questions remain open, such as the hypothesis of a common factor underlying the sensitivity to different types of illusions, as well as of personality correlates of illusion sensitivity. Visual illusions are a gateway to understand how we construct our experience of reality.

Illusions pike novel