A Dog’s View of Optical Illusions

Researchers are using visual tricks to try to better understand canine perception.

Written byCatherine Offord

| 10 min read

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Sarah Byosiere was at a barbecue just outside Melbourne, Australia, when she came up with the idea of presenting optical illusions to dogs. It was 2015, and she was visiting La Trobe University shortly after finishing a master’s degree on canine cognition back home in the US. Chatting at the barbecue with a group of psychologists who were studying how the human brain perceives visual illusions, it struck her that the same approach could provide a window into how dogs see the world around them—and how their perception differs from our own. “We had this crazy question of: Could you give a dog an illusion, and would they be able to see it?” she recalls.

What at first sounded like a gimmick soon morphed into a serious proposal. Psychologists use visual illusions all the time to study the shortcuts the human brain uses to extract information ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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