Abstract

TOKUMOTO, Alline Mayumi  and  JR., Alfredo Pereira. The response of biological sciences undergraduate students to the presentation of a visual illusion. Ciênc. cogn. [online]. 2006, vol.9, pp. 73-82. ISSN 1806-5821.

Initially we make a bibliographic review of recent results in Cognitive Neuroscience regarding the neural correlates of visual illusions. Based on this review, we made a research on cognitive processes related to the perception of a visual illusion. We presented the visual illusion Two-Stroke Flash (Mather, 2006) for two groups of undergraduate students in Biological Sciences of the UNESP/Campus of Botucatu city (Licenciature and Biomedicine modalities), and requested a written description of their visual experiences, having the objectives: a) to detect if they perceived the illusory movement (this perception would be correlated with a cerebral activity in the posterior visual areas); b) to detect if they perceived that the same was an illusion (this cognitive process would correlate with cerebral activity in frontal areas); and c) to compare the answers of the two groups, in view of the different curricular orientations. The results obtained in this research indicate that the majority of the students in the two groups perceived the illusory movement, having a tendency for the explanation of the percept as illusory by the students of the medical modality. © Ciências & Cognição 2006; Vol. 09: xxx-xxx.

Keywords : visual illusion; cognitive neuroscience; neural correlates; visual cortex; executive system; biological sciences..

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