Abstract
Gori and Hamburger (2006) presented the Rotating Tilted Lines Illusion (RTLI). Moving back and forth in front of this pattern makes the circle of lines appear to rotate in a clockwise and counterclockwise direction, respectively. The building blocks of the illusion are very simple: lines. This enables one to investigate the underlying mechanisms of the illusion directly. We reviewed the previous modeling works in this respect (Grossberg and Mingolla 1993; Gurnsey, Sally et al. 2002) and proposed an explanation of the illusory phenomenon based on a competition between the two types of neurons in primary visual cortex, namely end-stopped and contour cells (Pack, Livingstone et al. 2003; Yazdanbakhsh and Livingstone 2006). The illusion can be described based on the weighted average of the response of the two types of cell populations. A simple model for the integration of the two motion signals is proposed and discussed.
A.Y. was supported in part by NSF grant for CELEST in Cognitive and Neural Systems Department, Boston University and the by NIH grant EY13135 to Neurobiology Department (Livingstone Lab), Harvard Medical School.