Awareness of the light field: the case of deformation

Human observers group local shading patterns into global super-patterns that appear to be illuminated in some unitary fashion. Many years ago, this was noticed for the case of uniform, unidirectional illumination. Recently, we found that it also applies to convergent and divergent illumination flows, but that human observers are blind to rotational light flow patterns (in the sense of being unable to group the local shading patterns). We now report that human observers are also blind to deformation patterns. This is perhaps interesting because convergent, divergent, rotational, and deformation patterns all occur in natural light fields. This is an idiosyncrasy of the human visual system, on par with the fact that visual awareness fails to present the observer with saddle shapes.