Fuck Yeah Psychology

8 Jun 2011
Comments

27 notes

Colour-blinding wheel

Motion can affect how we perceive changes in colour, as demonstrated in an illusion created by Jordan Suchow and George Alvarez at Harvard University that won first place last week at this year’s Best Illusion of the Year Contest in Naples, Florida.

While watching the animation above, fix your eyes on the white dot in the center. When the surrounding ring is stationary, you’ll notice the dots inside changing colour. But as the wheel rotates, the flashing circles should appear to switch colour less often or not at all. In reality, the colours are changing at the same rate throughout the animation.

Suchow and Alvarez think that the phenomenon, called change blindness, occurs because specific brain areas monitors different locations in our visual field. When an object is moving fast, local detectors don’t have much time to register a colour change so they can remain undetected. The trick isn’t just for colour either, another version of the illusion, shows how motion can mask variations in shape and shade too.

To see the other finalists in this year’s Best Illusion of the Year Contest, click here.

Journal Reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.12.019

Caitlin Stier, contributor