Adelbert Ames’ Mind-Bending Illusions
Why eye-witness testimony can be unreliable
This post shows a pair of mind-bending optical illusions made by Adelbert Ames Jr. A professor of psychological optics at Dartmouth College and the Research Director at the Dartmouth Eye Institute, Ames (1880-1955) was a pioneer in the study of visual perception.
Ames came from an impressive family. His father, Adelbert Ames Sr, was a Civil War General, United States Senator, Governor of Mississippi, and an abolitionist. His brother was a United States Congressman, his sister was a suffragette, his son, Adelbert III, was a professor of neuroscience at Harvard, and his cousin was the author George Plimpton.
Ames became interested in vision as a young artist, hoping that a better understanding of vision would help his art. However, he became more interested in vision than art and devoted the rest of his life to that study.
Ames showed that we see what we expect to see. We have mental templates in our minds, often created by experience, that affect one’s perception of incoming visual information.
Ames window
This illusion shows that our mental rules for an object, in this case a window, often do not match reality. From experience, our brains expect a window to be rectangular, so the differently shaped window will fool our brains when it is spun
The following short, 3-1/2 minute video from an old Australian television show shows the window being made and used. The illusion should astonish you and is well worth the time to watch.
Ames room
Ames’ most famous illusion is the Ames room. We have a conscious and unconscious expectation about the dimensions of a room. The differently shaped Ames room thus plays impressive tricks on our minds, with us perceiving people impossibly becoming bigger and smaller.
The following is an explanation and demonstration of the Ames room.
The following is another short video showing a man moving about an Ames Room.
Our perception of the world is a construction of our brains
These and other illusions show that our perception of the world is a construction of our brains. They bring into question the reliability of eyewitness testimony and show that our perception is formed by the physical environment, education and culture in which we were raised. Opposing explanations of the same event often do not involve anyone lying.
Love those illusions!