What we perceive is not always what our eyes see. Vision, and perception more generally,
should not be thought of as a webcam that just takes pictures of the world. This is not a
fault in how our brains work, but rather is exemplary of how the brain constructs perception
and takes advantage of its massive inter-connectedness in ways that are highly similar to
social networks. The construction of perception is not only based on the information the
eyes capture, but also based on the information stored in the brain and "guesses" based on
this stored information. Illusory figure similar to that shown in Figure 1 is a laboratory example
of this construction process and demonstrates well how the visual system works. In the
real world, the visual system must handle situations of occlusion, noise, and equivocality
(that is, when it is unclear what bits of what we see belongs to one object versus another).