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Research on the visual rabbit illusion takes a leap forward
- benjijay 2y agoEither the gif's not loaded right or I'm more broken than I thought, but I'm only seeing two distinct flashes - one left and one right...
- BtM909 2y agoYou have to focus on the cross, and the demo on the page is slowed down. I don't know why they don't have the original speed there.
- BugsJustFindMe 2y ago> In this illusion created by researchers, the first flash appears to the left, and the second and third flashes are at the same spot to the right What third flash?
- Wistar 2y agoOh. Good. It’s not just me.
- MilanTodorovic 2y agoAfter covering the first part of the sceen, I still fail to see the 3rd flash
- jahnu 2y agoI’m seeing the illusory flash. Here is a version with beeps too. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yCpsQ8LZOco https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yCpsQ8LZOco
- xemoka 2y agoThis makes a little more sense than the article's demo, but I still only perceive two flashes, even with the audio. Maybe it's also environmental...
- jahnu 2y agoFor what it’s worth I’m viewing it fullscreen on a phone.
- BugsJustFindMe 2y agoThe version with three beeps and two flashes is a different illusion. This one is supposed to have an actual third flash and no beeps.
- jahnu 2y ago> This one is supposed to have an actual third flash and no beeps. Nope, it has only two flashes in reality :) If, like me, you are perceiving three when focusing on the + then the illusion is working. When I focus on the line where the flashes appear then I can clearly see there are actually only two flashes.
- whycome 2y agoNo, the article is a different illusion. Three flashes. :)
- jahnu 2y agohttps://streamable.com/an7hso https://streamable.com/an7hso I recorded it and slowed it for you And just in case I was going mad I checked the frames of the gif. There are 50 frames. Frame 15 has the left dot, 17 and 18 have the right dot.
- tobr 2y agoCan confirm that the gif only has two flashes, although the second one appears to be two frames long.
- l33tman 2y agoThat is the whole point of the illusion, that there are two filled circles that flash and your brain perceives it as 3 flashes because they come so fast that they are processed as a temporal chunk before you become aware of it.
- happytoexplain 2y agoSeems like that's not the same illusion - there are multiple closely related illusions here.
- Ukv 2y ago> That is the whole point of the illusion, that there are two filled circles that flash and your brain perceives it as 3 flashes Where is this from? I could be missing something, but everything I can see in the article and the abstract of the paper indicates that the point of the illusion is that showing three flashes causes us to misplace the second flash as being located at the midpoint of the first and second.
- l33tman 2y agoYeah it's supposed to be two flash positions only, but I missed that the last one is supposed to flash twice which it apparently doesn't in the gif so that was the confusion.
- SamBam 2y agoNo, that isn't it, re-read the article. The illusion is supposed to be that three flashes that are not evenly spaced, or are even spaced out of order (1--3-2) get perceived by the brain as evenly-spaced an in order. Look at the explanatory diagram with the labels "What our eyes see" and "What our brain "sees"" (the third image on the page). The gif is just broken. It's supposed to have a space between the second and third flashes.
- mbrumlow 2y agoIs this like the nerd version of “when you see it”? I can’t seem to see a third flash.
- drbig 2y agoThere are two flashes in the gif specifically, because some people will apparently see a third one "in the middle" between the real two. Hence the "illusory rabbit". I only see two though, and it seems I'm not alone.
- happytoexplain 2y agoThat is a different twist on the illusion. The gif is indeed supposed to have three flashes.
- drbig 2y agoMhm, and the twist then is that the second flash seems to be in the center, even though it is to the right?
- happytoexplain 2y agoThe gif frames are "left, off, right, right". I.e. there are only two flashes, but the second lasts twice as long. I assume somebody either didn't understand how gifs work, or they accidentally dropped frames in export. Note that there is also a version of this that has two flashes and the illusion is a third flash. The gif, as described, is intended to be the version where there are three real flashes.
- SamBam 2y agoThanks for working out the cause of the bug, I thought I was going mad. You mentioned another version of the gif. Is this one we can find somewhere?
- happytoexplain 2y agoI don't know if there's a gif specifically, but here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCpsQ8LZOco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCpsQ8LZOco
- drooby 2y agoInteresting.. I immediately "didn't get it" because I only saw two flashes. Wow I have such a big brain - I only perceive reality.
- SamBam 2y agoThat's a different one, that's one with auditory beeps and only two flashes. It's not the same as the illusion in the paper.
- happytoexplain 2y agoSome commenters conflated the two, which is why I acknowledged it as a different "version".
- noman-land 2y agoThis has been driving me mad. I thought I was broken.
- RIMR 2y agoSince the illusion example in the article is poorly described and implemented, here's a better example in video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCpsQ8LZOco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCpsQ8LZOco
- albert_e 2y agoThanks but again this seems to be somewhat related but not identical to the illusion described in the article. (Sure, the illustration / GIF / captioning on the OP aricticle is really poor and confusing) But the illusion described in the article involves three actual flashes (without beeps) and the illusion is aboutthe LOCATION of the second flash, not that the second flash itself is a phantom / non-existent / imagined one.
- monkpit 2y agoNot only does the gif only have 2 flashes, but the caption of the gif and the article text differ. The caption says there are 2 flashes on the right, the article immediately under the caption says 2 on the left.
- happytoexplain 2y agoIt does qualify the two-on-the-left version as "in traditional experiments", but yes, even then it's still not 100% clear if they are describing two different versions there on purpose or by accident.
- jvanderbot 2y agoThese kinds of illusions are something machines doing tracking & estimation already experience. The estimator is trying to fit a path that makes kinematic sense onto noisy measurements of position. When I see these all I can think is that your brain clearly feeds you "filtered" and "estimated" corrections for you to decide against. This type of perception-before-decision is ubiquitous in robotics. There's 2 hard problems in robotics: Perception and funding.
- SamBam 2y agoI wonder to what extent our brains also back-fill in other, more complicated cause-and-effect information. If a certain cause-and-effect is more logical to our brains, does it simply recreate the memory of our perception to the more logical one?
- TeMPOraL 2y agoOur eyes have a very narrow area of full-fidelity vision. The brain creates an illusion of us seeing a large field of view by having the eyes do a lot of quick movements very fast[0], while blanking our vision during the movement itself so we don't notice it[1], then stitching the result together into one perceived image, while eliminating, interpolating or faking anything that was happening during transitions or outside of sampled areas[2], and slapping a common timestamp on the whole composite. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade [1] - It's why you can never see your eyes moving when looking at your reflection in the mirror - but you can see it when you look at the image of a selfie camera on your phone, thanks to the processing lag. [2] - Hence the analog clock illusion, when you look at a regular analog clock with a second hand, and the first second seems to last longer than it should - the brain is assuming the hand is stationary and it takes until the clock ticks again for it to realize its mistake. This illusion notably doesn't happen on continuous-motion clocks.
- araes 2y agoWhat the article describes at the end sounds a bit like how many folks' memories may work. At least mine often has that issue unless I consider those memories. A year afterward, there wasn't any inconvenient gap there, it was all like a quick training montage, and 1 -> 2 -> 3 nicely spaced. "I didn't spend months writing that proposal, that was like a week tops wasn't it?"
- whynotkeithberg 2y agoI'm only seeing 2 flashes no matter what I do... am I doing something wrong? Even if I cover parts of the screen I still only see 2 flashes.
- nmstoker 2y agoReassured that others also don't see the third flash. If you're going to work on subtle detail oriented things such as illusions, it seems like this ought to be noticed and resolved really quickly, which doesn't fill me with massive confidence in the rest of the research!