Short-Term Educational Program on Optical Illusions to Improve Students’ Abstract Thinking Abilities

Expressing the physical world using symbols and numbers (abstract thinking) is critical to scientific reasoning. Several studies have shown that experience with the correspondence between abstract graphic representations and the physical world can aid the acquisition of abstract representations. We evaluated the potential of optical illusions to help hone abstract reasoning. Optical illusions occur when stimuli in the physical world do not match the viewer’s subjective experiences, and both the physical world and perceptual experience must be understood. This study proposed an educational program on optical illusions and subjective experience in the form of a workshop for high-school students in Japan. We designed optical illusion blocks by combining geometric figure patterns with the physical world and developed two specialized learning programs. The psychological experimental results were consistent with the rules of illusion. According to the post-intervention questionnaire, the participants felt they understood these rules based on the experiments in the first part of the program. The results demonstrated that they could apply the rules thus learned to some extent and that the proposed program based on the illusion phenomenon effectively improved abstract thinking abilities.