COGSCI 138

Optical Illusions: Brain, Machine, World

2-3 credits · Undergraduate

Optical illusions are entertaining, but more than just visual tricks: They reveal deep insights into perception. This course critically explores what constitutes an illusion, and how an expansive definition can bridge human and machine perception. Illusions appear in nature, art, and our increasingly digital world. We’ll learn how to measure illusion perception in both humans and machines, and examine state-of-the-art machine perception through the lens of illusion—exploring machine hallucination, image generation, and adversarial imagery. This course blends lectures, discussions, readings, hands-on labs, and a research project.

Topics

1. Learn ways in which optical illusions have been defined, as well as challenges in doing so 2. Discover the broad range of ways illusions occur in the world from naturally-occuring illusions to those intentionally designed for art, public and digital spaces 3. Understand research methods for measuring illusion perception and ways that has informed either the underlying neural mechanisms or understanding of the strengths and limitations of machine perception 4. Compare and contrast human and machine perception, identifying their respective reactions to illusions 5. Discover illusions that may emerge from machine learning models

Official catalogue course objectives and student learning outcomes

Prerequisites & course information

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Sources

Course catalogue ↗2026-2027