Several concentric star polygons can be found spinning on a gradient background. As these polygons spin, rays of light can be seen appearing from the center of the image, but in reality these rays of light are not produced by the image; they are produced by our brains. This visual illusion is called “Scintillating Starburst”, and shows how our brains process visual information.
"The research illustrates how the brain 'connects the dots' to create a subjective reality in what we see, highlighting the constructive nature of perception," explains Pascal Wallisch, a clinical associate professor in New York University's Department of Psychology and Center for Data Science and senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal i-Perception.
"Studying illusions can be helpful in understanding visual processing because they allow us to distinguish the mere sensation of physical object properties from the perceptual experience," adds first author Michael Karlovich, founder and CEO of Recursia Studios, a multidisciplinary art and fashion production company.
The authors acknowledge that the visual effects of this illusion are superficially similar to a number of previously described effects of other, grid-based illusions. However, their Scintillating Starburst, unlike known visual illusions, evokes a number of newly discovered effects, among them that fleeting illusory lines diagonally connect the intersection points of the star polygons.
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(Image Credit: Michael Karlovich, Recursia LLC)