おわかりいただけるだろうか…【再】
Remember that intriguing image that went viral online, the one that completely changes depending on how you look at it? It's back in the spotlight!
While previously discussed as an urban legend, this time, AI analysis sheds new light on the profundity of human perception and how our psychology is influenced by information.
Even those who've seen it before are excitedly discussing potential new "Aha!" moments and discoveries online.
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Pareidolia
Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon where humans unconsciously perceive meaningful patterns, such as faces of people or animals, specific objects, or significant shapes, from vague and meaningless stimuli (e.g., cloud shapes, wall stains, burn marks). The question "Can you see it...?" in this article likely aims to trigger precisely this phenomenon. For instance, most people have experienced seeing animal shapes or human faces in clouds, or toast burns resembling a picture. This is due to the human brain's inherent tendency to constantly seek and recognize patterns or familiar shapes. Particularly, facial patterns are among the most crucial and sensitively processed pieces of information for humans, making us prone to recognizing faces from even slight stimuli. This phenomenon is also considered a part of a "survival strategy" that humanity developed during evolution to quickly identify predators or companions. The images and videos currently gaining attention are typical examples where what initially appears as mere noise or abstract patterns can be instantly recognized as a meaningful image when viewed from a specific perspective or given a suggestion. The interesting aspect of this phenomenon lies in how different people perceive the same thing differently, which generates diverse discussions and interpretations online.
Gestalt Psychology
Gestalt psychology is a school of thought based on the idea that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," primarily studying the mechanisms of human perception and cognition. It explains that we tend to perceive external information not merely as a collection of individual elements, but as meaningful "wholes (Gestalts)." For example, when looking at a myriad of dots, we perceive them as lines or shapes. Images and videos that "change drastically depending on the perspective" as described in this article can be explained precisely by the principles of Gestalt psychology. Specifically, there are laws such as "Proximity," "Similarity," "Closure," "Continuity," "Common Fate," and "Good Form," which determine how we organize visual information and recognize patterns. For instance, an image that initially appears as just a pattern might be recognized as a completely different image (e.g., a human face or an animal shape) by focusing on a specific part or by becoming aware of how certain elements relate to others. This is due to our brain's active function of reconstructing information to form the simplest and most meaningful overall picture. This phenomenon is not merely an optical illusion but demonstrates the active nature of human perception, leading to a deeper understanding of the current article.
Selective Attention
Selective attention is a cognitive function that involves selecting and focusing on specific information from a vast amount of data, while consciously ignoring other information. Our brain constantly receives a massive influx of stimuli through our five senses, but it cannot process all of them simultaneously. Therefore, it efficiently processes information by focusing on data necessary for goal achievement, information with high urgency, or information of interest. The title of this article, "Can you see it...?", clearly indicates an intention to guide the reader's selective attention to a specific point. For example, by suggesting "there's a hidden face here," readers shift their awareness away from other irrelevant information in the image and focus on a particular pattern to find the hinted "face." Through the working of selective attention, things that were previously unseen can suddenly become visible, or conversely, something that was visible might disappear. A famous experiment, related to "inattentional blindness," shows that most people fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking across the screen when they are focused on counting basketball passes. This re-emerging topic also heavily involves the function of selective attention, where people who didn't notice it in earlier discussions make new discoveries by being guided to focus their attention with the information that "there's something somewhere."