Literally some of the first American anthropology studies were on the differences in visual color perception between Americans and Inuits caused by culture, back in the 1910’s, by a guy whose original academic study and training was in the physics of light and color. It’s literally one of the oldest studies of anthropology and what kicked off the field, the fact that vision scientists haven’t accounted for it and this is news to them is a damning indictment of the lack of interdisciplinary work.

Really stark results in that paper! I definitely encourage folks to check out the preprint so you can see the illusions for yourselves. While I fell strongly for all the illusions with large differences between urban and rural participants, I was totally flummoxed by the contrast illusion which was used to demonstrate that there are certain illusions which are strongly experienced cross-culturally (the image they used is in the appendices of the paper). I actually thought there might be something wrong with the image or my display, so I went on the illusion’s Wikipedia page and was still not remotely fooled by any of the examples. According to that same Wikipedia page, there’s a strong correlation between schizophrenia and not being affected by this illusion. I’m not schizophrenic (and it’s worth noting that 19% of the UK/US participants in this post’s study also didn’t fall for it, presumably not all schizophrenic), but it was still an interesting tidbit.