During January Term (J-term), students in Randolph-Macon College Psychology Professor Cedar Riener’s class discovered that what they see, remember, feel, or think is not always what it appears to be. Or is it?

Riener’s course, The Psychology of Illusions, explores several domains of psychology through the lens of illusion. Through a variety of hands-on approaches, students learned about the illusions of perception, memory, mood, conscious will, cognitive development, and judgement.

Riener, whose research focuses on how the body influences perception of the basic layout of the natural world, says, “By investigating how the mind gets things wrong, we discover ways in which our psychological processes normally work. A central theme that emerges through this integrative approach is that illusions are often side effects of our remarkably adaptive mind.”

Chalking it Up
On a recent chilly day, Riener’s students headed outside to RMC’s iconic Fountain Plaza to create a sidewalk drawing that appears to be three-dimensional. Using yardsticks, long pieces of string and bright, oversized pieces of chalk, they applied rules of perspective to create an illusion of solid objects rising (and falling) from the concrete tiles of the plaza. By looking through a lens that Riener had set up in front of the project, students could see that although the drawings appeared flat and distorted while they were drawing them on the ground, from a particular viewpoint the objects appeared to be three-dimensional.

Changing Perspectives
Madison Weisner ’19 is a communication studies major and journalism minor who had never before taken a psychology course. She went into the class curious but thinking she’d encounter “a lot of textbook work.” She quickly realized that the course is anything but typical.

Weisner’s enthusiasm about the course—and the chalk project—was palpable.

“Professor Riener does a great job of making his lessons interactive, and students really engage with each other. I really, really liked that,” she says. “He took the material and course objectives and treated them in a way that all students—no matter what their major—could appreciate.”

Classmate Faith Smithers ’22 (cybersecurity major; psychology minor) says Riener’s course was ever-changing—each time the class met, they were in for a unique experience.

“I learned a lot from it—and it’s also the reason I chose psychology as a minor,” she says. “We learned about idealism, realism, and illusions and perceptions. This class opened up my interest in psychology, and in other things, such as TED Talks, something I hadn’t experienced before this course.”

Ian Harris ’21 (computer science major; Japanese minor) says it was fascinating to learn that what the eyes perceive is often different than what is actually there.

“In class, we learned about the Staircase Gelb illusion [a phenomenon in which a black object is originally mistaken as white when brightly lit, and then seen as progressively darker as it is compared with brighter objects, illustrating how we use the context of a scene to judge the colors of objects],” he says. “That was so interesting—and something I’d never heard about before.”

“This course is a great way for students to experience the wonders of their own familiar minds in new and exciting ways,” says Riener. “Students from all disciplines—not just those majoring in psychology—learned that the world is not always as it seems. Illusions are a call to be humble about what we know and what we see. But also, when we look closer at our wonderful adaptive minds, we see the shortcuts that lead to illusions are often necessary guesses for the impossible problem of an exact understanding of reality.”

Cedar Riener
Riener, who earned his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from University of Virginia, joined the RMC faculty in 2009. He has taught a variety of courses at RMC, including Sensation and Perception, Cognitive Psychology, and Research and Theoretical Systems in Sensation and Perception. He is the co-author (with Daniel Willingham) of Cognition: The Thinking Animal (4th edition), forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

In 2015, Riener was quoted in a BuzzFeed article about an Internet sensation regarding the color of a dress.

January Term: A Month of Discovery
Each year, Randolph-Macon College offers its popular January Term (J-term), which provides students with the opportunity to immerse themselves in another culture, embark on an internship, or conduct groundbreaking research. On campus, J-term offers for-credit courses across the curriculum, making it possible for students to fully engage for one month in a single subject.