Refractive Error and Monocular Viewing Strengthen the Hollow-Face Illusion

We measured the strength of the hollow-face illusion—the ‘flipping distance’ at which perception changes between convex and concave—as a function of a lens-induced 3 dioptre refractive error and monocular/binocular viewing. Refractive error and closing one eye both strengthened the illusion to approximately the same extent. The illusion was weakest viewed binocularly without refractive error and strongest viewed monocularly with it. This suggests binocular cues disambiguate the illusion at greater distances than monocular cues, but that both are disrupted by refractive error. We argue that refractive error leaves the ambiguous low-spatial-frequency shading information critical to the illusion largely unaffected while disrupting other, potentially disambiguating, depth/distance cues.