Watch the video: Do you also suffer from curvature blindness? Find out in this experiment.
Do you trust what you see with your own eyes? Then this experiment could raise doubts. What do you see in the gray area of this image?
When you see angular and wavy lines, you are like most people. In fact, however, all the lines on the graph are wavy. A look at the black and white corners of the image confirms this.
Curvature blindness is what Japanese researcher Kohske Takahashi calls the phenomenon he discovered in an experiment. The psychologist is not using this to describe an illness – but rather an illusory effect caused by the structure of this image.
How does this happen?
The lines, which appear angular, consist of gray and black lines – the coloring reinforces the appearance of straight lines.
The curvy looking lines have the valleys accentuated – this makes them look softer. If you change the height of the lines, the effect disappears again. So the illusion only appears in a certain size range of the waves.
Researchers assume that our visual perception is pre-structured and hierarchical. In his research report, Takahashi suspects that the perception of corners is fundamentally more dominant in the visual system than the perception of curves.
The Japanese researcher explains in an interview with the British “Telegraph” that the phenomenon could be part of an evolutionary process:
“We’re surrounded by man-made products that have a lot more corners than a natural environment – so does our visual environment.”
“This visual phenomenon does not cause any problems in our everyday life – otherwise someone else would have discovered this illusion much earlier.”
So curvature blindness is harmless and pretty common. And it shows us: How we perceive our surroundings has changed again and again. The landscapes and things that surround us have a significant impact on this.