ABSTRACT
There are many thousands of visual illusions, most of which serve to show that the human visual system does not, in fact, perform some form of inverse physics but instead uses a wide variety of assumptions, simplifications, and heuristics (see Section 2.5.5). Perhaps the most common feature of nearly all visual processing-from simple edge detection through object recognition and up to aesthetic judgment-is that these processes are context dependent. That is, the same visual signal can be interpreted in many different ways depending on the information right next to it (either spatially or temporally), on our previous experience, and on a host of other factors.
