Perception & Optical Illusions

Perception and cognition simulations demonstrate how the brain constructs reality from ambiguous sensory input. Classic optical illusions — Müller-Lyer, Ebbinghaus, Café Wall, and Motion Aftereffect — are rendered interactively with controls that let you vary the parameters that modulate illusion strength, connecting low-level visual processing to high-level perceptual inference. The Stroop effect demo measures your reaction time to congruent versus incongruent colour-word pairs, making automatic versus controlled processing palpable.

Auditory scene-analysis simulations demonstrate primitive and schema-driven auditory segregation: how the brain separates simultaneous sound streams based on frequency proximity, onset synchrony, and learned speaker identity. Change-blindness and inattentional-blindness demos show how selective attention filters most of the visual field. These interactive experiments are used in cognitive psychology courses, UX research, and the design of warning systems and human-factors engineering.

Each simulation in this category is built with accuracy and interactivity in mind. The underlying mathematical models are the same ones used in academic research and professional engineering — just made accessible through a web browser. Changing parameters in real time and observing the results is one of the most effective ways to build intuition for complex scientific and engineering concepts.