In Color Adapting or Chromatic Adaptation the eyes adjust to a certain color stimuli. The chromatic adaptation befools the viewer by the same color illusion.
The famous Cornsweet illusion or Craik–O’Brien–Cornsweet illusion or Craik–Cornsweet illusion. In this illusion, the entire right region looks slightly lighter than the left area where as the brightness of both areas is exactly the same.
Don’t believe us? See this image, here only the space is added in between those two portions and blackened out.
In this illusion, there are two motions:
1. the blue rectangle moves in straight way
2. the background with black and white color rotates in one direction
If you look directly at the blue rectangle, you will perceive it move straight and does not change its color. When you look at the red square, you will perceive it moves in a zigzag way (the direction of the rectangle depends on the current rotation angle of the background) and its color changed brighter when moving in black areas and darker when moving in Grey areas.
The motion of the rectangle and the background create two sources of information.
when we look at the display, we can discern multiple features simultaneously but its quite different when we look at the display peripherally. It is hard for our visual system to analyze sources of information exactly.
The motion of the background is global motion and the motion of the blue rectangle is internal motion. It could be the global motion affects to the internal motion because the global motion has a stronger affection than the internal motion to the peripheral visual system.
There are many illusions only work or work better in peripheral visual system (e.g: lightness illusion, color illusion, contrast illusion, image aftereffect)
In this illusion, the blue rectangle’s color changes is kind of lightness illusion but it only works in peripheral visual system. Sometimes, we are in “passive peripheral visual system”, for example when we look at a moving picture but when we really concentrate look at a point in the picture then whole picture will stop moving.
Do you see something unusual in this illusion. Are the balls changing size? Also the background color of this picture is yellow but you perceive the yellow areas between white areas are darker than others.