Our minds can often deceive us into thinking that what we see is reality. When we try to understand something, our mind interprets visual cues to determine if those things are where they should be. We know that two objects placed next to each other in space will not necessarily intersect unless they are closer together than the distance between them. We can also tell how far away an object is by comparing the size of the object to the size of the background. Parallel lines converge towards a vanishing point giving us a sense of depth, but we can fool ourselves into believing that an object is further away than it really is. Our eyes can trick our brains into thinking that an object is larger than it actually is, and vice versa. In that sense, our perception is often tricked with optical illusions.
In the 1950s Roger Shepard, a psychologist, devised an experiment to test whether people could recognize shapes they had seen before – he presented them with a series of abstract shapes and asked them to identify them later. He found that people were often unable to name the shapes they saw, and instead made up names for them. They would describe them as patterns, curves, or lines. These findings suggest that we do not think about things the way we actually perceive them. We use our memories of our past experiences to help us understand what we’re seeing, and so we can’t always trust what we see.
