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The human visual system is tasked with recovering the different physical sources of optical structure that generate our retinal images. Separate research has focused on understanding how the visual system estimates (a) environmental sources of image structure and (b) blur induced by the eye’s limited focal range, but little is known about how the visual system distinguishes environmental sources from optical defocus. Here, we present evidence that this is a fundamental perceptual problem and provide insights into how and when the visual system succeeds and fails in solving it. We show that fully focused surface shading can be misperceived as defocused and that optical blur can be misattributed to the material properties and shape of surfaces. We further reveal how these misperceptions depend on the relationship between shading gradients and sharp contours, and conclude that computations of blur are inherently linked to computations of surface shape, material, and illumination.

The perception and misperception of optical defocus, shading, and shape