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These kinds of illusions are something machines doing tracking & estimation already experience. The estimator is trying to fit a path that makes kinematic sense onto noisy measurements of position. When I see these all I can think is that your brain clearly feeds you "filtered" and "estimated" corrections for you to decide against.

This type of perception-before-decision is ubiquitous in robotics.

There's 2 hard problems in robotics: Perception and funding.




I wonder to what extent our brains also back-fill in other, more complicated cause-and-effect information. If a certain cause-and-effect is more logical to our brains, does it simply recreate the memory of our perception to the more logical one?


Our eyes have a very narrow area of full-fidelity vision. The brain creates an illusion of us seeing a large field of view by having the eyes do a lot of quick movements very fast[0], while blanking our vision during the movement itself so we don't notice it[1], then stitching the result together into one perceived image, while eliminating, interpolating or faking anything that was happening during transitions or outside of sampled areas[2], and slapping a common timestamp on the whole composite.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade

[1] - It's why you can never see your eyes moving when looking at your reflection in the mirror - but you can see it when you look at the image of a selfie camera on your phone, thanks to the processing lag.

[2] - Hence the analog clock illusion, when you look at a regular analog clock with a second hand, and the first second seems to last longer than it should - the brain is assuming the hand is stationary and it takes until the clock ticks again for it to realize its mistake. This illusion notably doesn't happen on continuous-motion clocks.




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