The Leaning Tower Illusion

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pisa.tower04.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

These images are identical, yet the tower on the right appears to lean more. Why?

Frederick Kingdom, Ali Yoonessi, and Elena Gheorghiu of McGill University discovered this effect in 2007. Normally parallel towers viewed from below appear to converge with distance; because that doesn’t happen here, the brain infers that the towers are diverging.