What the carpentered world does to visual perception – a fresh look

Testing visual illusion displays a recent study found a dramatic influence of the cultural background. Where members of Western urban societies perceived illusory distortions, members of a rural society in Africa did not see distortions, and shapes that immediately popped out in members of the rural cultural group were only perceived with a delay, if at all, by members of the Western cultural group. In this paper, I try to explain, based on what we know about the human visual system, how those displays produce the perceptions reported by the subjects in this study, and why the reports differ between the two cultural groups. I propose the hypothesis that people living in a “carpentered world” develop mechanisms that exploit linear perspective for space perception and speculatively compare this process to the way learning to read causes the development of a word-form recognition area in the visual cortex.