Thinking it was one of those things that you stare at for a while and something jumps out to scare you, I did not watch too closely at first. Once I had wasted a few minutes waiting for the zombie to pop up, I resigned myself to the fact that I was wrong and that maybe there was something really interesting about this picture. (It was either that or all of the comments which raved about this picture’s strange but awesome qualities were all lies.) I had to wait a few more minutes before the man finally moved but when he did, I was amazed.
This is a great example of an ambiguous illusion. Ambiguous illusions are formed when we do not perceive enough information to allow our minds to form a positive picture of the stimulus(Gregory, 1968 p.70). In the case of this picture, I think it is a little more difficult to decipher because of the man’s shoulder. While, if you are only looking at his face, it is relatively easy to see it switch orientations, if you take the shoulder into account, which implied the orientation of facing the viewer, it is much harder to see the switch. This is because the shoulder give the brain information about which way the man is facing even though the portion of his face that we see is ambiguous.
References:
Gregory, R. L. (1968). Visual illusions. Scientific American, 219, 66-76.
~Post by Amber Kolaga~
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