PSYC 490: Illusions of the Mind

(Exploring the mind through perceptual and cognitive unreality)

Spring 2025 — “Living” syllabus

General Information

When: Tuesday/Thursday 11am-12:15pm.

Where: Hanes Art Center 0218

Instructor: Sami Yousif

Email: sami.yousif@unc.edu

Office hours: By appointment

Prerequisite for enrollment: You must have completed either PSYC 101 or NSCI 175.

Course description

The broad goal of this course is to better understand how the mind works. But we’ll approach the study of the mind from a unique perspective: through the lens of illusion. This course will begin by examining the causes and meanings of various (perhaps familiar) visual illusions. Then we’ll work our way up to “higher-level” illusions. We’ll discuss illusions of memory, time, morality, love, you, and even reality itself.  Along the way, we’ll try to answer some fundamental questions about the mind: What can illusions reveal about the mechanisms of perception/cognition? Why are they so pervasive? And if they are so pervasive, how can we ever know what is real?

By the end of this course, successful students will:

  1. Develop broad knowledge of a wide range of perceptual / cognitive phenomena

  2. Develop an understanding of effective psychophysical experimentation

  3. Develop an integrative perspective of how the mind works

  4. Hone their independent, critical-thinking skills

Assignments & Grading

For more information on assignments and grading, see the “official” syllabus.

Course outline

Class #1 (Thursday, January 9th): Intro to the course

SLIDES FOR PART #1 CAN BE FOUND HERE

Part I: Perceptual illusions:

Class #2 (Tuesday, January 14th): Illusions of size

Yousif, S. R., & Keil, F. C. (2019). The additive-area heuristic: An efficient but illusory means of visual area approximation. Psychological Science, 30(4), 495-503.

Class #3 (Thursday, January 16th): Illusions of color

Class #4 (Tuesday, January 21st): Illusions of motion

Suchow, J. W., & Alvarez, G. A. (2011). Motion silences awareness of visual change. Current Biology, 21(2), 140-143.

Class #5 (Thursday, January 23rd): Illusions of number

Franconeri, S. L., Bemis, D. K., & Alvarez, G. A. (2009). Number estimation relies on a set of segmented objects. Cognition, 113(1), 1-13.

Class #6 (Tuesday, January 28th): Illusions of faces

Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions: Making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17(7), 592-598.

Class #7 (Thursday, January 30th): Filler/flex

Class #8 (Tuesday, February 4th): Illusions of sound

Yousif, S. R., & Scholl, B. J. (2019). The one-is-more illusion: Sets of discrete objects appear less extended than equivalent continuous entities in both space and time. Cognition, 185, 121-130.

Class #9 (Thursday, February 6th): Illusions of time

Sherman, B. E., DuBrow, S., Winawer, J., & Davachi, L. (2023). Mnemonic content and hippocampal patterns shape judgments of time. Psychological Science, 34(2), 221-237.

Class #10 (Tuesday, February 11th): Illusions of everything: Adaptation

Burr, D., & Ross, J. (2008). A visual sense of number. Current biology, 18(6), 425-428.

Yousif, S. R., Clarke, S., & Brannon, E. M. (2024). Number adaptation: A critical look. Cognition, 249, 105813.

Class #11 (Thursday, February 13th): Illusions of everything: “Top-down effects”

Firestone, C., & Scholl, B. J. (2016). Cognition does not affect perception: Evaluating the evidence for “top-down” effects. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39, e229.

Class #12 (Tuesday, February 18th): Illusions of memory

Prasad, D., & Bainbridge, W. A. (2022). The Visual Mandela Effect as evidence for shared and specific false memories across people. Psychological Science, 33(12), 1971-1988.

Class #13 (Thursday, February 20th): “Ask me anything”

Class #14 (Tuesday, February 25th): Mid-term prep

Class #15 (Thursday, February 27th): Mid-term Exam #1

Class #16 (Tuesday, March 4th): Mid-term review

Class #17 (Thursday, March 6th): Reviewing the course so far…

Part II: “Higher-level” illusions

Class #18 (Tuesday, March 18th): Illusions of chance

Kahneman, D. (2003). Maps of bounded rationality: Psychology for behavioral economics. American Economic Review, 93(5), 1449-1475.

Class #19 (Thursday, March 20th): Illusions of confidence & knowledge

Rozenblit, L., & Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: An illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive Science, 26(5), 521-562.

Class #20 (Tuesday, March 25th): Illusions of agency

Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2012). Feeling robots and human zombies: Mind perception and the uncanny valley. Cognition, 125(1), 125-130.

Class #21 (Thursday, March 27th): Illusions of morality

Haidt, J., Bjorklund, F., & Murphy, S. (2000). Moral dumbfounding: When intuition finds no reason.

Class #22 (Tuesday, April 1st): Illusions of self

Quoidbach, J., Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. (2013). The end of history illusion. Science, 339(6115), 96-98.

Class #23 (Thursday, April 3rd): Illusions of love

Dryer, D. C., & Horowitz, L. M. (1997). When do opposites attract? Interpersonal complementarity versus similarity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(3), 592-603.

Class #24 (Tuesday, April 8th): Illusions of God?

Kelemen, D. (2004). Are children “intuitive theists”? Reasoning about purpose and design in nature. Psychological science, 15(5), 295-301.

Class #25 (Thursday, April 10th): Illusions of reality

Where am I? https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/daniel-dennett-where-am-i/

Class #26 (Tuesday, April 15th): Mid-term prep

Class #27 (Thursday, April 17th): No class!

Class #28 (Tuesday, April 22nd): Mid-term Exam #2

Class #29 (Thursday, April 24th): Mid-term review + Conclusion

(Optional) Final Exam (Monday, May 5th, 12pm-3pm): Cumulative (!) Final Exam.