A VERY trippy optical illusion has left people scratching their heads as to whether a set of lines are curvy or zigzagged.
The puzzling image apparently plays on a phenomenon dubbed “curvature blindness”.
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This optical illusion has left people scratching their heads as to the shape of the linesCredit: journals.sagepub.com
Despite how they appear in the illusion, all the lines are exactly the same – wavy, not zigzagged.
Japanese cognition and illusion researcher Kohske Takahashi provided an extensive scientific breakdown and analysis of the optical illusion in a recent edition of the journal i-Perception.
Mr Takahashi wrote: “Here, we report a novel illusion – curvature blindness illusion – that will provide novel implications for contour perception, in particular, for the underlying mechanisms of curve and corner perception.”
Basically, our eyes can be tricked into seeing a wavy line as a zigzag line depending on the colour scheme of the line and the background.
He reckons that when our brains are confused about if a line is curved or not, it assumes a zig-zag shape to make life easier.
In the image, the lines observed on the grey background appear to be in a zigzag pattern, as our brains are tricked into imagining a corner – something he calls “obtuse corner detection”.
“Physically, however, all lines are wavy lines with an identical shape; there is no triangular wave and hence there is no corner,” Mr Takahashi said.
He added: “Despite the simplicity and effect magnitudes, to the best of our knowledge, no one has reported about this phenomenon.”
It’s unclear exactly why our brains perceive the zigzag contour, but Mr Takahashi reckons they default to seeing corners rather than curves when they get confused.
This article originally appeared on news.com.au.
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Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: HIS Education