Perception: Fact or Fiction?

Can you tell real science from a convincing, but made-up story?

Join researchers from the University of Aberdeen’s Perception Group for an interactive evening exploring how our perceptual and attentional systems work. We’ll take a series of familiar phenomena and popular beliefs and offer you two explanations for each. Both will sound plausible. Both will draw on real psychological ideas. But only one will stand up to the scientific evidence. The other may sound positively supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - but as Mary Poppins reminds us, saying something loudly and convincingly doesn’t make it true.

Expect demonstrations, creative experiments, audience voting and some carefully constructed scientific fibs as we explore what research can, and cannot, tell us about attention and perception.

Will you spot the fiction before we reveal the evidence? Come along and put your scientific detective skills to the test.

Stage in a lecture theatre with two podiums, one with a sign saying fact and the other with a sign saying fiction