Our eyes do not always tell us exactly where things are—and that may be a feature of how biological vision works, rather than simply a flaw. A new study by York University researchers uses a common illusion to ask: If artificial intelligence is meant to see more like us, should it make some of the same systematic perceptual “mistakes”?

For example, after staring at something moving steadily in one direction, a stationary object viewed immediately afterward can appear slightly displaced in the opposite direction. This well-known visual illusion, called a motion aftereffect, gives scientists an unusual window into the computations underlying perception: The image itself has not moved, but our experience of where it is has changed.

The study, titled “The macaque IT cortex but not current artificial vision networks encode object position in perceptually aligned coordinates,” is published today in Current Biology.