Abstract: Traditional cognitive psychology is limited in its ability to explain illusory perception. The research findings of cognitive neuroscience on motion illusions, contour illusions, and color illusions suggest a single mechanism of overlapping neural correlates accounts for the occurrence of visual illusions. The neural activities for illusory perception are intrinsically the same as for accurate perception. Specifically, illusory perception and corresponding accurate perception share the same neural correlates. The occurrence of illusory perceptions needs no special neural correlates. Rather, the neural activity during illusory perception is stronger than that during accurate perception on the shared neural correlates

Key words: vision, illusion, neural correlates, cognitive neuroscience