Supposed Right brain vs Left brain test
Oct. 16th, 2007 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackThe link going around is here, from an Australian newspaper. The image shows a silhouette of a dancer rotating in the air. Is it rotating clockwise or anticlockwise?
People seem to see it one way or the other, though most people can swap the way they see it. The paper says it depends on being right-brained or left-brained. There are some analyses floating about from before the paper made the link, but I can't find anything definitive.
Logically, the silhouette *ought* to be perceivable either way -- if there are insufficient depth cues, and you cover up the shadow, it ought to be front-back symmetric. But to me it definitely *looks* clockwise[1].
Can anyone tell if there's anything special about the image? Does anyone know if right/left-brain-ness really has any bearing?
[1] Bonus points for saying "from the top or the bottom". From the top, please.
ETA: No-one finds any support that this has anything to do with left/right brains, that seems to have appeared with the news article. So not necessarily false, but doubtful, given that it has no source.
People seem to see it one way or the other, though most people can swap the way they see it. The paper says it depends on being right-brained or left-brained. There are some analyses floating about from before the paper made the link, but I can't find anything definitive.
Logically, the silhouette *ought* to be perceivable either way -- if there are insufficient depth cues, and you cover up the shadow, it ought to be front-back symmetric. But to me it definitely *looks* clockwise[1].
Can anyone tell if there's anything special about the image? Does anyone know if right/left-brain-ness really has any bearing?
[1] Bonus points for saying "from the top or the bottom". From the top, please.
ETA: No-one finds any support that this has anything to do with left/right brains, that seems to have appeared with the news article. So not necessarily false, but doubtful, given that it has no source.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-16 02:53 pm (UTC)I did manage to consciously perceive one thing which might justify my subconscious visual response: if you examine the path traced by the toes of her lifted foot, it's not a straight-back-and-forth path but an ellipse-like curve. Her foot is higher up (in the projection) when it's travelling L->R than it is when travelling R->L, or in other words her toes are tracing that ellipse clockwise.
On the reasonable assumption that we're looking at her from a normal eye level (either seated or standing, but in any case above her foot), we are seeing that ellipse from above, and so if it appears to be traced clockwise then that's because it is being traced clockwise. So that fixes her direction of rotation. For her to be rotating anticlockwise we'd have to be looking at the path of her foot from below, either because our POV was from very near the floor or because she was deliberately lifting her foot higher when facing us.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-16 05:59 pm (UTC)Or I wonder if the rotating and bobbing make conflicting cues that different people see different ones of, but I've no idea if that's true. One would have to generate a lot of such images with varying coordinates and see which have the effect.