Girl or old woman illusion which means. Comic test: who did you see (an old woman or a girl)? Optical illusions on video

Jastrow's Illusion (Jastrow, 1899)

Who do you see here? Hare or duck?

The illusion was originally published in a German humor magazine Fliegende Blatter (October 23, 1892, p. 147). For more on the history of illusion, see.
Jastrow, J. (1899). The mind's eye. Popular Science Monthly, 54, 299-312.

Ehrenstein illusion. Schematic modification. (Ehrenstein, 1930)

Hare-duck in full growth.

Ehrenstein, W. Untersuchungen uber Figur-Grund-Fragen. Zeitschrift fur Psychologie 117, 1930. P. 339-412 (Fig. 3, p. 369).

Wife or mother-in-law (two versions of the picture).

Who do you see here?
A young girl or a sad old woman?

How many people are there?

One? Two? Or maybe three?

Who do you see? Sad old man or cowboy?

J. Botwinick "Husband and Father-in-Low", 1961

Illusion with the face of the pharaoh.

Is that a donkey or a seal?

Who is it?

American Indian or Eskimo?

Old man or lovers?

Is it just a rose?

Sandro del Prete "Life In The Rose"

What is it?

Face profile? What if you take a closer look? Still don't see it?
Did you see the inscription "Liar" (liar, deceiver)?

Mysterious portrait of a general.

The picture shows 9 people. Can you find them all?

Don Quixote.
How many people do you see here?

Portrait of Sigmund Freud.

What is Einstein thinking?

The brain of a man.

Find a donkey.

G.A. Wotherspoon "Society, A Portrait"

Illusions with a skull.

clown in love

L "amour de Pierrot" A Clown "s Love", 1905

Salvador Dali. Slave Market with Vanishing Bust of Voltaire, 1940.

Donkey head or naked girls?

Gossip and Satan

G.A. Wotherspoon "Gossip, and Satan Came Also"

10 friends. Can you find the tenth "friend"

Rusty Rust "Ten Friends"

Are they old people or singing Mexicans?

Tests

"My wife or mother-in-law" is one of the most famous optical illusions in the world.

It is believed that your age depends on what you see: in the same picture you can see both a young woman turning her face away and the profile of an elderly woman looking solemnly to the side.

Picture test

So what do you see in this picture?

The chin of a young girl or the nose of an older woman? An old woman's chin or a girl's chest? What first caught your eye?

Have you ever wondered why you see exactly what you see? A study by two Australian psychology professors says what you see in a picture determines your age.

Optical illusions of vision

According to this study, young people immediately see a girl, while older people, on the contrary, see an older woman first.

This study included 393 participants (242 men, 151 women) aged 18 to 68 years. The average age of the participants was approximately 32 years.

All of these people were shown the picture. Literally within one second they had to look at it, and then they were asked about who they see in the picture. This meant the gender and age of the depicted object.

When the researchers separated the 10 percent of the oldest and 10 percent of the youngest participants in the experiment, they found some patterns. It turned out that those participants who saw a young woman, as a rule, were younger than the rest. Conversely, those who first noticed the old woman were very old.

The purpose of the study was to determine whether a person's own age affects the initial perception and interpretation of the image at a subconscious level.

In other words, you see who you are. But even if you first saw an elderly woman, you should not be upset. Just remember: you are as old as you feel.

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Take a few seconds to look at Fig. 1. Then look at fig. 2 and describe in detail what you see in this second figure.

Rice. 1. Young woman

Do you see a woman? What age do you think she is? How does she look? How are you dressed? Who do you think she is?

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Most likely, you will describe the woman in the second picture as a person of about twenty-five - very attractive, elegantly dressed, the owner of a small nose and restrained manner. If you weren't married, you'd hit on her. And if they worked in a fashion store, they would take her as a fashion model.

What if I tell you that you are wrong? And if I declare that the person in the picture is an elderly woman of sixty or seventy years old, with an extinct look, a huge nose, and, of course, is not good for any models? This is the woman you would probably like to help cross the road.

Who is right? Take a look at the picture again. Do you see the old woman now? If not, look again. See the big hooked nose? Handkerchief?

If we talked personally, we could discuss this picture. You would describe to me what you see, and I would tell you what I see. And we would continue to share opinions until we showed each other what each of us sees.

Rice. 2. Is the woman really young?

Since we cannot do this, I suggest you refer to fig. 3, consider the image placed on it, and then return to fig. 2. Do you see an old woman now? It is very important that you see it before you continue reading.

I first encountered this exercise many years ago as a student at Harvard Business School. With his help, the teacher wanted to show that two people, looking at the same thing, can see different things and at the same time both be right. It's not about logic, it's about psychology.

The teacher brought a large stack of cards, half of which had a picture of a young woman (Fig. 1) and the other half an image of an elderly woman (Fig. 3). He distributed cards with a picture of a young woman to students in one part of the audience, and cards with a picture of an old woman to those who sat in another part of it. He suggested looking at the cards carefully, concentrating on the image for ten seconds, and then returning them. After that, he showed on the screen a picture (Fig. 2) and a combination of both images, and asked the students to describe what they see. Almost everyone who first saw the cards with the image of a young woman saw a young woman on the screen. And almost all of those who first saw the card with the image of an elderly woman, now saw her on the screen.

Then the teacher asked one student to explain to another, from the opposite side of the room, what he was seeing. In the process of their conversation, communication problems were highlighted.

What does "old lady" mean? This woman is no more than twenty - twenty-two years old!

Come on, come on! Are you joking? She is seventy years old, or even all eighty!

What are you, blind? This is a young woman. Pretty. You can hit on this one. She is just lovely!

Charm? Yes, it's an old hag!

Rice. 3. Old woman

The dispute did not fade away, everyone was sure that he was right and proved his position. And all this happened despite the fact that the students had a very important advantage, which we rarely have in real life: they knew from the very beginning of the experiment that there was another point of view. And with all this, only a very few have tried to look at the picture through the eyes of another person. After much arguing, one of the students came up to the screen and, pointing his finger at the line in the drawing, said:

It's a young woman's necklace! To which another replied:

What a necklace, that's an old woman's mouth!

Gradually calming down, they began to discuss individual differences. Finally, first one student, then another saw that two images simultaneously existed on the screen. Thanks to the calm, patient, detailed discussion, everyone in the room was able to see the picture from a different perspective. However, as soon as we turn away and then look at the image again, almost every one of us immediately saw the image that we tuned in to during the first ten seconds of acquaintance with the picture.

I often use this experiment in my work, both with individuals and organizations, because it leads to discoveries that are important for our personal effectiveness and the effectiveness of our interaction with others. First of all, it demonstrates how powerfully predestination affects our perception, our paradigms. If a ten-second study of a picture can have such an impact on how we see an object, then what can we say about the power of influence of our life experience! Everything in our life that can influence us - family, school, church, co-workers, friends, buddies and such modern social paradigms as the ethics of personality - all this has an impact on us that we are not aware of, contributing to the formation of our own system. views, our paradigms, our maps. In addition, this experiment shows that our paradigms are the source of our attitudes and behaviors. Outside of them, we cannot act organically. We will simply lose our integrity if we begin to say and do things that are contrary to our ideas. If you, being prepared to see a young woman, are exactly what you saw in the combined picture (this happens in 90% of cases), then it will undoubtedly be difficult for you to think about helping her cross the road. And your attitude towards this woman, and your behavior must certainly be consistent with how you see her.

This reveals one of the weaknesses of the ethics of personality. The attempt to change attitudes and behaviors will be fruitless if we do not explore the underlying paradigms from which these attitudes and behaviors stem.

In addition, our picture example shows how strongly our paradigms influence the nature of our relationships with other people. Just as clearly and objectively as we think we see the world around us, we begin to realize that others see it differently, from their own, obviously just as clear and objective, point of view. "Where we stand depends on where we sit."

Each of us is inclined to believe that he sees phenomena as they really are, i.e. that he is objective. However, this is not the case at all. We see the world not as it is, but as we ourselves are, or as we are determined to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we end up describing ourselves, our ideas, our paradigms. As soon as others disagree with us, we immediately come to the conclusion that it is they who are wrong. However, as our experiment shows, everyone sees the same thing in their own way, through the prism of their own unique experience.

This does not mean that facts do not exist at all. In our example, two people, whose perceptions were initially programmed with different images, are viewing the combined image together. Now they simultaneously see the same facts - a combination of black lines and white space, and both recognize them as facts. However, the interpretation of these facts by each of them depends on the initial experience of each, and all these facts acquire significance solely by virtue of their interpretation.

The more we realize what our main paradigms, maps or ideas are, and also to what extent we are influenced by our own life experiences, the more responsible we are to our paradigms, study them, compare them with reality, listen to the opinions of others, become receptive to other people's views, thus developing a more complete picture of reality, and therefore a more objective point of view.

Before this passage, Stephen Covey talks about the power of paradigms. And as an example, he offers a small experiment.

We are used to taking the world around us for granted, so we do not notice how our brain deceives its own masters.

The imperfection of our binocular vision, unconscious false judgments, psychological stereotypes and other distortions of world perception serve as a pretext for the emergence of optical illusions. There are a lot of them, but we tried to collect for you the most interesting, crazy and incredible of them.

Impossible figures

At one time, this genre of graphics was so widespread that it even got its own name - impossibilism. Each of these figures seems quite real on paper, but simply cannot exist in the physical world.

Impossible Trident

The classic blevet is perhaps the brightest representative of optical drawings from the category of “impossible figures”. No matter how hard you try, you will not be able to determine where the middle prong originates.

Another striking example is the impossible Penrose triangle.

It is in the form of the so-called "endless staircase".

And also Roger Shepard's "impossible elephant".

Ames room

Issues of optical illusions interested Adelbert Ames Jr. from early childhood. After becoming an ophthalmologist, he did not stop his research on depth perception, which resulted in the famous Ames Room.

How the Ames room works

In a nutshell, the effect of the Ames room can be conveyed as follows: it seems that two people are standing in the left and right corners of its back wall - a dwarf and a giant. Of course, this is an optical trick, and in fact these people are of quite ordinary height. In reality, the room has an elongated trapezoidal shape, but because of the false perspective, it seems to us rectangular. The left corner is farther away from the visitors' view than the right corner, and therefore the person standing there seems so small.

Illusions of movement

This category of optical tricks is of most interest to psychologists. Most of them are based on the subtleties of color combinations, the brightness of objects and their repetition. All these tricks mislead our peripheral vision, as a result of which the perception mechanism goes astray, the retina captures the image intermittently, spasmodically, and the brain activates the areas of the cortex responsible for detecting movement.

floating star

It's hard to believe that this picture is not an animated gif-format, but an ordinary optical illusion. The drawing was created by Japanese artist Kaya Nao in 2012. A pronounced illusion of movement is achieved due to the opposite direction of the patterns in the center and along the edges.

There are quite a few such illusions of motion, that is, static images that appear to be in motion. For example, the famous spinning circle.

Or yellow arrows on a pink background: when you look closely, it seems that they are swaying back and forth.

Beware, this image may cause eye pain or dizziness in people with weak vestibular apparatus.

Honestly, this is a regular picture, not a GIF! Psychedelic spirals seem to drag somewhere into the universe full of oddities and wonders.

Illusions-shifters

The most numerous and fun genre of drawings-illusions is based on a change in the direction of looking at a graphic object. The simplest upside-down drawings just need to be rotated 180 or 90 degrees.

Two classic shifter illusions: nurse/old woman and beauty/ugly.

A more highly artistic picture with a catch - when rotated 90 degrees, the frog turns into a horse.

Other "double illusions" are more subtle.

Girl / old woman

One of the most popular dual images was published in 1915 in the cartoon magazine Puck. The caption to the drawing read: "My wife and mother-in-law."

old people / mexicans

An elderly couple or guitar-singing Mexicans? Most see old people first, and only then do their eyebrows turn into a sombrero, and their eyes into faces. The authorship belongs to the Mexican artist Octavio Ocampo, who created many pictures-illusions of a similar nature.

Lovers / Dolphins

Surprisingly, the interpretation of this psychological illusion depends on the age of the person. As a rule, children see dolphins frolicking in the water - their brain, not yet familiar with sexual relationships and their symbols, simply does not isolate two lovers in this composition. Older people, on the contrary, first see a couple, and only then dolphins.

The list of such dual pictures is endless:

In the picture above, most people first see the face of an Indian, and only then look to the left and distinguish a silhouette in a fur coat. The image below is usually interpreted by everyone as a black cat, and only then does a mouse appear in its contours.

A very simple upside-down picture - something like this can be easily done with your own hands.

Illusions of color and contrast

Alas, the human eye is imperfect, and in our assessments of what we see (without noticing it ourselves) we often rely on the color environment and the brightness of the background of the object. This leads to very interesting optical illusions.

gray squares

Optical illusions of colors are one of the most popular types of optical illusion. Yes, yes, squares A and B are painted in the same color.

Such a trick is possible due to the peculiarities of how our brain works. A shadow without sharp borders falls on square B. Thanks to the darker "environment" and smooth shadow gradient, it appears to be significantly lighter than square A.

green spiral

There are only three colors in this photo: pink, orange and green. Don't believe? Here's what happens when you replace pink and orange with black.

Is the dress white and gold or blue and black?

However, illusions based on the perception of color are not uncommon. Take, for example, the white and gold or black and blue dress that conquered the Internet in 2015. What color was this mysterious dress, and why did different people perceive it differently?

The explanation for the dress phenomenon is very simple: as in the case of gray squares, it all depends on the imperfect chromatic adaptation of our organs of vision. As you know, the human retina consists of two types of receptors: rods and cones. Rods capture light better, while cones capture color. Each person has a different ratio of cones and rods, so the definition of the color and shape of an object is slightly different depending on the dominance of one or another type of receptor.

Those who saw the white-and-gold dress drew attention to the brightly lit background and decided that the dress was in the shade, which means that the white color should be darker than usual. If the dress seemed blue-black to you, then your eye first of all paid attention to the main color of the dress, which in this photo really has a blue tint. Then your brain judged that the golden hue was black, brightened due to the rays of the sun directed at the dress and the poor quality of the photo.

In fact, the dress was blue with black lace.

And here is another photo that baffled millions of users who could not decide if there was a wall in front of them or a lake.

Optical illusions on video

Ballerina

This insane optical illusion is misleading: it is difficult to determine which leg of the figure is the supporting one and, as a result, to understand in which direction the ballerina is spinning. Even if you succeeded, while watching the video, the supporting leg can “change” and the girl seems to start to rotate in the other direction.

The most popular optical illusion "Ballerina"

If you could easily fix the direction of the ballerina's movement, this indicates a rational, practical mindset. If the ballerina rotates in different directions, this means that you have a stormy, not always consistent imagination. Contrary to popular belief, this does not affect the dominance of the right or left hemisphere.

monster faces

Of interest to fans of unusual things is the chair designed by Chris Duffy. It seems that it relies solely on the front legs. But if you dare to sit on it, you will realize that the shadow cast by the chair is its main support.

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"My wife and my mother-in-law"

If you are seeing this famous illusion for the first time, what is the first thing you notice? Girl or old woman? And this moment - the first impression of the picture, the scientists took to study the visual perception of a person and the influence of age on him.

Why was this particular illusion deemed appropriate? The fact is that the drawing is purely based on the perception of the face: either you can see the girl, or you can see the profile of an older woman solemnly looking towards the left side of the drawing. In any case, it is impossible to see both portraits at the same time.

So who's in the picture?
Girl or old woman?

Hint for those who see only the girl:
See it? The chin of a young woman doubles as the nose of an old woman, and the chin of an old woman is also the breast of a young woman.

Two professors of psychology at Flinders University in Australia have just come to the conclusion that vision and awareness of what they see has a lot to do with people's age. According to the study, a young man will see a young woman first, while older people will see an old woman.

The experiment involved 393 volunteers (242 men and 141 women) aged 18 to 68, although the average age was 32 years. They all showed the image for seconds and then asked the sex and age of the person in the picture.

When the researchers separated the responses of the 10% of the older volunteers from the 10% of the younger ones, they found that the older group saw the old woman for the first time, while the younger group saw the youngest woman for the first time. More precisely, this is so: people aged 18 to 30 years old usually saw a girl, and over 30 years old - an elderly woman.

The aim of the study was to determine whether very age-related distortions affect interpretation, starting from the subconscious level.

Is that what happened to you? Well, you may just not be as young as you think.

And I, in turn, ask myself:
Is this why the older generation (not all, of course, far from all) so vehemently rejects innovation in art?

Interferes with objective age perception? The subconscious rebels against novelty, is it not ours, they say, not ours?

What do you think? Feel free to write).