ABSTRACT
In addition to optical effects, there are a number of neural processes involving interactions between spatially adjacent cells in the retina that seem to contribute to some visual illusions. This chapter focuses on the way in which the percept may be distorted during the process of encoding the retinal image into a pattern of neural responses. Neural responses on the retina do not occur in isolation. There is much evidence to indicate that the way in which a region of the retina responds is often affected by the way in which neighboring regions are behaving. Given the fact that both summation and inhibition processes take place on the retina, their action must be taken into account whenever we have a pattern imaged on the retina, if we wish to predict the form of the final neural response. There is an interesting manipulation that seems to verify the influence of retinal neural interactions on age trends in illusion magnitude.
