Can YOU see them? Mind-bending optical illusion has 16 circles hidden in plain sight – so can you spot them within 10 seconds?
Once you see them, the captivating image plays havoc with the eyes as it appears to switch back and forth between the two shapes.
It follows the incredible traffic light optical illusion shared to TikTok that tricks your brain into seeing red where there isn’t any.
The Coffer Illusion was created in 2006 by Anthony Norcia, a professor of psychology and visual development at Stanford University in California.
‘First time viewers of this display invariable do not see the 16 circles segmented from the background,’ said Professor Norcia.
‘Rather, they see a series of rectangles that they frequently describe as “door panels”.
‘The illusion pits segmentation cues against what appears to be a very strong prior [knowledge] to interpret the image as a series of 3D structures coffers with closed boundaries.’
In his research, Professor Norcia showed the image to about 100 people who took an average time of 45 seconds to see the circles.
He said some observers take much longer, but others notice the circles after a very short amount of time – only 10 to 15 seconds.
The Coffer Illusion has been doing the rounds on Twitter after being posted by Italy-based engineer Massimo Orgiazzi.
It seems the general consensus is it takes a bit of time to notice the circles, which can be found in between the rectangles.
One Twitter user said: ‘Took a second and I had to do that weird thing with my eyes to see those hidden pictures from those posters in the 90s.’
Another user on Twitter said of the hidden circles: ‘I’ve looked at it for a full, intense 10 minutes, but unfortunately I couldn’t see them.’
The illusion plays on the fact that the visual brain is heavily geared towards identifying objects in what we see – in this case, engraved wooden panels.
Rectangles are often more common than circles in our daily environment, and so the brain may be geared towards perceiving rectangular shapes.
Another famous optical illusion that plays tricks on the brain is the ‘expanding hole’, created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka at Ritsumeikan University in Kobe, Japan.
As we look at it, the black mass in the middle of the image seems to be getting bigger, as if moving into a dark environment like a tunnel, or falling into a hole.
Professor Kitaoka is already known as a creator of optical illusions, including the famous rotating snakes illusion and the ‘Asahi’ brightness illusion.
The Asahi illusion has a central region that looks more luminous than its white background, even though it is the same white everywhere.
Optical illusions work because our eyes and brain ‘speak to each other in a very simple language, like a child who doesn’t know many words’, according to experts at the University of Queensland’s Brain Institute.
‘Most of the time that’s not a problem and our brain is able to understand what the eyes tell it,’ they say.
‘But your brain also has to “fill in the blanks” meaning it has to make some guesses based on the simple clues from the eyes.
‘Mostly those guesses are right… sometimes, however, the brain guesses wrong.’
Source: daily mail
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Can YOU see them? Mind-bending optical illusion has 16 circles hidden in plain sight – so can you spot them within 10 seconds?
4 thoughts on “Can YOU see them? Mind-bending optical illusion has 16 circles hidden in plain sight – so can you spot them within 10 seconds?”
Dívala jsem se, ale neviděla jsem víc než obdelníkové obrazce. Jak jsemsi při tom podpírala hlavu, zazrcalil se na obrazovce odraz kulatých hodinek na obrazovce a pak jsem uviděla vedle první kruh a potom všechny ostatní.