BY:
Since there's a word for everything else, it stands to reason there's a word for the optical illusion you described. Later today I am going to call the U of Colorado psych department and ask them if they have a name for it.
Someone below said the human eye sees more or less continuously. Somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind is a memory of a professor's telling us in class that the eye does actually sample a certain number of times a second. This was in conjunction with an explanation of how motion pictures look as though there is true "fluid" motion.
I do know that when I am driving or riding in a car I can sometimes get a stop motion of the wheel on a car beside me if I glance over at it quickly. Never a good enough picture to tell how many spokes, but enough information to be able to say that the wheel is spoked as opposed to a disc. I've always thought that I had to have taken that little snapshot in something around a 20th of a second to be able to get that much detail.
If I find out anything I'll post back.
TEd
