Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on May 17, 2006
Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(4):878-884; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhk042
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The Neural Mechanisms Underlying the Müller-Lyer Illusion And Its Interaction with Visuospatial Judgments
1 Brain Imaging Centre West & Institute of Medicine, Research Centre Jülich, Germany, 2 Department of Neurology-Cognitive Neurology, University Hospital, Rheinisch-Westfálische Technische Hochschule, Aachen, Germany
Address correspondence to Ralph Weidner, Institut für Medizin, AG Kognitive Neurologie, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Leo-Brandt-Strasse 5, 52425 Juelich, Germany. Email: r.weidner{at}fz-juelich.de.
Arrows terminating a line can distort the perceived line length. This so-called Müller-Lyer illusion can be used in healthy human subjects to mimic the performance of neglect patients in visuospatial judgments (e.g., in the landmark task). In this study, we investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the Müller-Lyer illusion, the landmark task, and their interaction. This was achieved by parametrically manipulating the magnitude of the Müller-Lyer illusion both in a landmark and in a luminance (control) task. As expected, the landmark task activated right posterior parietal cortex and right temporo-occipital cortex. In contrast, the neural processes associated with the strength of the Müller-Lyer illusion were located bilaterally in the lateral occipital cortex as well as the right superior parietal cortex. The data not only converge with but also extend neuropsychological data that indicate maintained line-length illusion in neglect patients. In addition, our results support the size-constancy scaling hypothesis as a putative mechanism underlying line-length illusions. Furthermore, activation that was driven by both the task and the strength of the Müller-Lyer illusion was observed in right intraparietal sulcus, thus arguing in favor of an interaction of illusory information with the top–down processes underlying visuospatial judgments in right parietal cortex.
Key Words: attention • illusion • visuospatial • top-down • bottom-up
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