PsychWorld

This set of two images shows a man on the left who looks noticeably angry and a woman on the right who appears to be relatively calm. However, when you back yourself away from your computer screen (say, 8 feet or so), the two faces switch places, with Mr. Angry on the right this time and Mrs. Calm on the left!

This week’s illusion, named after Japanese discoverer Hajime Ōuchi, is a classic that is still not fully understood. Take a look at the central circular area of vertical black and white bars in relation to the surrounding area of horizontal bars. Do you notice any movement?

Last week, we showed you some “rotating” illusions created by Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka. This week, we have two additional illusions by Kitaoka, but they’re of an entirely different nature. And just in time for Valentine’s Day, they feature lots and lots of hearts.

Last October, we showed you the Rotating Snakes Illusion, which featured a grouping of spiraling circles that appeared to move with our eyes. It turns out that Akiyoshi Kitaoka, the Japanese psychologist who first came up with the Rotating Snakes, has made many variations of the “rotating” graphics over the last 9 years, some of which are just as neat as the original. This week, we’ve decided to show you a few of our favorites.

If this photo of a group of vacationers looks rather blue (in the literal sense…not figuratively, as they look to be pretty happy!), that’s because it’s been masked with a cyan (light blue) filter. Now take a look at the woman third from the right—the only person in the picture who doesn’t have her hands up in the air. What color would you say her top is?

Have you ever imed or called a co-worker to ask them a question even though they sit only two cubicles away from you? What about in college, have you ever decided not to take a specific class because it was all the way on the other side of campus?

These examples seem ridiculous, but even a short distance may seem far away once you know a place intimately enough according to some fascinating new research conducted at Northwestern University.

This week’s optical illusion is amazingly simple yet effective. Take a look at the graphic below and count how many colors you see.

For thousands of years, artists attempted to figure out how to represent three-dimensional scenes on two-dimensional surfaces, and one look at the canon of art shows that they have been successful at doing so for at least the past 600 years. About 170 years ago, the discovery of photography then gave us a new way to depict three-dimensional scenes in two dimensions. Today, with our constant exposure to both traditional Western art and photos, we are now entirely susceptible to taking any two-dimensional image of a familiar scene and interpreting it as a three-dimensional scene. This week’s illusion, first discovered by Stanford University’s Roger Shepard in 1981, plays on our tendency to make such interpretations.

Take a look at these two tables. Which one of them do you think is longer, and which one is wider?

If you’ve ever gone into a dark room after being in a much lighter room, you’ve probably noticed that everything looked, well, dark. But after being in the dark space for awhile, you probably noticed that you were better able to make out the figures and furniture there, as well as distinguish between the room’s lighter and darker shades. This acclimation to the dark after being in the light resulted from your eyes’ ability to recover from oversensitivity to the highly contrasting stimuli of intense light and dark encountered in such a short period of time. The following illusion plays on this notion of oversensitivity and adaptation.

Happy New Year!

This week’s illusion is based on the same concept as the Adelson Illusion (“Which Square Is Darker?”) we showed you back in October, but there’s an added twist to this one. Whereas the previous illusion appeared to be in shades of gray throughout, this week’s illusion, created by R. Beau Lotto of the Lottolab studio in London, features “colored” squares.

I’ve put “colored” in quotation marks, because the “blue” squares in the left image, while appearing to be blue, and the “yellow” squares in the right image, while appearing to be yellow, are actually neither color.