Motion Silencing

Motion Silencing is a visual illusion created in Python that impairs your ability to detect motion. Focus on the center of the red dot and notice when the circle of changing colored dots move clockwise then counter-clockwise that the colors on the dots stop changing momentarily.

This effect is known as Motion Silencing discovered by Harvard’s Vision Lab.

SILENCING demonstrates the tight coupling of motion and object appearance. Simply by changing the retinotopic coordinates—moving the object or the eyes—it is possible to silence awareness of visual change, causing objects that had once been obviously dynamic to suddenly appear static.

If you’d like to read more about this implementation, visit the Github page.