Have you ever wondered how different optical illusions work? This fun, informative, and very cool website developed by ophthalmologist Dr. Michael Bach of the University of Freiburg's Medical School introduces 48 interactive visual illusions and phenomena. The illusions are animated and accompanied by explanations that help visitors make sense of their perceptual responses. Major illusion...

The Web site from BioMedia (1) is a fascinating look (no pun intended) at the eyes of other animals. Various images of eyeballs link to essays that explain such questions as how animals can see underwater and how many times the eye independently evolved in the animal kingdom. The next site (2) is based on a PBS Nova documentary about nocturnal animals. Visitors can click on an image of an eye to...

In what looks to be an incredibly successful partnership, the universities of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon have teamed up in an "investigation of the neural mechanisms that give rise to human cognitive abilities..." This site, the online home for the center is packed full of interesting resources for researchers, prospective students, and graduate students alike. The Research section is...

Peter Kaiser, an emeritus professor at York University, created this website about visual perception to supplement curriculum. After reading the introduction describing how to best utilize the materials, students and educators can find twenty four chapters covering many topics including, physics of the visual stimulus, the basics of Fourier analysis, and spectral sensitivity. For each topic, the...

How have changing notions of vision and sight transformed artistic endeavors? As modern art emerged in the late 19th century, scientists were also exploring how humans see, and some remarkable work came out of this period. This creative online exhibit explores the science of vision by looking through the works of scientists and artists like Cennino Cennini, Leon Battista Alberti, and Michel...

This Web page from the Visual Cognition Laboratory at the University of Illinois Psychology Department offers a collection of intriguing video demos showing examples of visual stimuli used in the lab to study change blindness and inattentional blindness. In the first demo, for example, an actor changes into another actor within the same cut -- something that na've observers will fail to notice...

Offered through the John Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah, this Web site aims to "summarize the recent advances in knowledge and understanding of the mammalian retina." The Web site is arranged simply in a book-like fashion with chapters headings leading to well-referenced text and illustrations. The information presented is quite comprehensive, and would serve as a useful educational...