[HN Gopher] Research on the visual rabbit illusion takes a leap ...
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Research on the visual rabbit illusion takes a leap forward
Author : geox
Score : 39 points
Date : 2024-06-11 14:02 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kyushu-u.ac.jp)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kyushu-u.ac.jp)
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| Oh. Good. It's not just me.
| MilanTodorovic wrote:
| After covering the first part of the sceen, I still fail to see
| the 3rd flash
| benjijay wrote:
| Either 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 wrote:
| You 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.
| jahnu wrote:
| I'm seeing the illusory flash.
|
| Here is a version with beeps too.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yCpsQ8LZOco
| xemoka wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| For what it's worth I'm viewing it fullscreen on a phone.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| The version with three beeps and two flashes is a different
| illusion. This one is supposed to have an actual third flash
| and no beeps.
| tobr wrote:
| Can confirm that the gif only has two flashes, although the
| second one appears to be two frames long.
| l33tman wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| Seems like that's not the same illusion - there are multiple
| closely related illusions here.
| Ukv wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Yeah 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 wrote:
| No, 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.
| l33tman wrote:
| Yes I see the last one was supposed to flash twice, but at
| 2 positions. The explanation is the same though as far as I
| understood the article, that the brain processes all
| flashes as a single temporal chunk and that is what causes
| the temporal re-alignment. It kind of resembles the famous
| letter-jumbling where you can still read the text if you
| re-arrange the letters inside the words if you read fast
| enough.
| mbrumlow wrote:
| Is this like the nerd version of "when you see it"? I can't seem
| to see a third flash.
| drbig wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| That is a different twist on the illusion. The gif is indeed
| supposed to have three flashes.
| drbig wrote:
| Mhm, and the twist then is that the second flash seems to be
| in the center, even though it is to the right?
| happytoexplain wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Thanks 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 wrote:
| I don't know if there's a gif specifically, but here's a
| video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCpsQ8LZOco
| drooby wrote:
| Interesting..
|
| I immediately "didn't get it" because I only saw two
| flashes.
|
| Wow I have such a big brain - I only perceive reality.
| SamBam wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| Some commenters conflated the two, which is why I
| acknowledged it as a different "version".
| noman-land wrote:
| This has been driving me mad. I thought I was broken.
| RIMR wrote:
| Since 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
| albert_e wrote:
| Thanks 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 wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| These 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Our 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
|
| [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 wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Reassured 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!
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