OpenSesame 0.26 Earnest Einstein, the next version of the graphical experiment builder, will be released soon! For those eager to test drive the next version, pre-release packages are available. You are encouraged to report bugs on the forum.

• Download pre-release packages (choose latest)

For this release, the focus is on bug-fixes, improved stability, and adding polish to the user interface. I expect 0.26 to be the best, most stable release of OpenSesame yet! Also, I'm glad to say that OpenSesame is rapidly becoming a collaborative effort. Special thanks go out to Daniel Schreij, for help in many areas, and Edwin Dalmaijer, for building the Python portable packages.

In the animation below, you can see a ring of four faces gradually morphing between Leighton Meester and Natalie Portman. If you keep your eyes fixated on the green cross in the center, you will notice that the morphing is quite difficult to see—but only when the faces are moving. If you match the movement with your eyes, or if the faces stop moving, you can clearly see the morphing happening.

This illusion was presented twice, in different guises, in the finale of last year's vision sciences illusion contest. Once by Jordan Suchow and George Alvarez, who ended up winning the contest. And once by Rob van Lier and Arnon Koning. So this illusion may not be entirely original, but it is certainly the most aesthetically pleasing rendition out there!

So what's going on here? Previously, I explained this phenomenon in terms of retinal motion. When the faces move, they slide across your retina (the light sensitive part of your eye), at least if you keep your eyes still. So the same face will be 'seen' successively by different parts of your retina. And because the organization of the retina is roughly preserved in visual areas of the brain, the same face will be successively processed by slightly different (sub)areas of your brain. According to the 'retinal motion' explanation, these different brain areas do not communicate effectively enough for changes to be detected. At least not if they are small and gradual.

But, as it turns out, this …

We all see things that are not there, every now and again.

Particularly things that are on our mind. For example, if you're thinking about someone, you're increasingly likely to see, or think to have seen, that someone out on the street. This is because our perception is biased by our expectations. Put differently, we try to fit what we see into mental templates.

A recent study by Smith and colleagues shows this in a new way, which I think is kind of cool. In this study, participants watched patches of completely random noise, like static on television. But the participants were tricked. (Yes, they keep falling for it.) They were told that on half of the trials a face was hidden in the noise. And they were instructed to indicate on every trial whether they had seen a face or not.

The analysis that Smith and colleagues performed was quite simple. They took the average of the patches of noise on which the participants indicated that they had seen a face, and subtracted from this the average of the non-face patches. If the participants had just been randomly pressing keys, this procedure would have led to a uniformly black image. After all, the average of lots of noisy patches is uniformly grey. And grey minus grey is black.

But this is not what happened! Out of the noise emerged clear (well, let's say reasonably clear) outlines of faces. Apparently, the participants tried to match their template of what a …

In the animation below, it appears as though Mario is jumping vertically and the Koopa shell is gliding horizontally. But actually, as you can clearly see when the background stops moving, Mario and the shell both move in circles!

(This illusion is a variation on Stuart Anstis' Flying Bugs illusion.)

So what's going on here? The first thing to note is that, although Mario and the shell are following a similar circular trajectory, they are in antiphase. Which is just a fancy way of saying that when Mario is at 12 o'clock, the shell is at 6 o'clock. The background image also follows a circular trajectory. But it goes clockwise, so the rotation of the background is opposite to that of Mario and the shell.

The crux of the illusion is that the rotations of the three elements (Mario, the shell, and the background) are aligned in a very specific way. The horizontal component of the background motion is the same as Mario's: When the background moves to the right, so does Mario. Mario's horizontal movement is therefore cancelled out, and consequently Mario appears to move only vertically. Conversely, the vertical component of the background motion is matched to that of the shell. Therefore, the shell appears to move only horizontally.

This illusion is a very salient demonstration of how we use background information to make judgements about positions and movement. We don't perceive the actual movement of Mario and the shell, we perceive their movement relative to the background …

The prestige of an academic journal is determined largely by its impact factor. This is a somewhat odd measure of how often, on average, a paper in a journal is cited in other academic publications. To give you a rough idea: In 2010, Nature and Science, the two most famous academic journals, had impact factors of 36 and 31, respectively. A decent journal in the field of cognitive science would have an impact factor of, say, 3. And when a journal's impact factor drops below 1, things get dodgy.

Editors will try to boost their journals' impact factor, of course. This is good, for the most part, because it provides editors with an incentive to create a decent journal that publishes good science. But as Wilhite and Fong show in a recent edition of Science, there's a dark side as well: Coercive self-citation.

Wilhite and Fong distributed a survey under academics from various disciplines. In this survey, respondents indicated whether, when submitting a manuscript to a journal, they had ever been asked by the editor to include useless citations to other papers from that same journal. The motivation for the editor to do so is obvious: Additional self-citations raise the journal's impact factor. Wilhite and Fong give a strikingly blatant example of such a request made by an editor to an author:

"You cite Leukemia [once in 42 references]. Consequently, we kindly ask you to add references of articles published in Leukemia."

Clearly, this seemingly friendly question implies something that …