Radiolab

Have you ever looked a red and blue barber’s pole and wondered why the stripes seem to be traveling up, rather than around the pole? Or have you looked at a still-life painting where the vase looked so real you could almost pick it up, even though it was just a painting? These two examples raise some interesting questions about how we interpret the things we see.

Dr. Elias Cohen is looking for the answers to such quandaries and is the first guest in our new series of scientist profiles. In this series we drop in on scientists in their labs to chat about who they are and what they do.

Dr. Cohen researches visual perception at the Vision Science Center at the SUNY College of Optometry in New York City. He studies the visual cues which help us understand that something is moving, round or symmetric (for example), and what that tells us about how the human brain processes visual information. Researchers in the field of visual perception hope to understand how our sense of sight gathers information from our surroundings and how it shapes our experiences of the world.

Anna Boiko-Weyrauch followed Dr. Cohen around the lab:

Read more about Dr. Elias Cohen’s work.

Or see an optical illusion with a Necker Cube here.