Sam Schwarzkopf

I love this because without fail the first few 100 ms of every time I open my Blue Sky I first see the weird purple microscopy image - and then it switches to forks.

Yeah my first thought was that this is some microscopy image 🙂

a visual illusion: what appears to be some strangely shaped pink pieces of cloth are actually the background on which several forks are laying

these are forks

Just working off my memory here the reasons were:
- Lens changes far too subtle to explain age-dependency of percept
- Especially for the young vs middle aged adults
- Distorting images to emulate lens effect doesn't affect percept

I mean, it doesn't require a checkboard floor and that cylinder with implied shadow etc. The same illusion happens for grey squares surrounded by light or dark areas. So this is simultaneous brightness contrast, which we know happens very early (pre-V1 presumably).

It's weird. I used to hear either. Now I cannot force it to be Yanny at all. I wonder if -that- is an aging effect (and only over a few years...)

But the Adelson illusion isn't a good example of this because you don't need the light-and-shadow interpretation at all. It works just with the contexts so this is really simply simultaneous brightness contrast?

That said, I am now incapable of hearing Yanny it seems. It used to be much more bistable when I first heard it!

YouTube video by CityNews What do you hear? Yanny or Laurel?

This is true but there are good auditory equivalents. For instance, the Yanny/Laurel illusion which is more akin to the Dress (although it's more ambiguous so perhaps more like an auditory Necker cube).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvKK...

That's one interpretation but it's not ours. I would argue that aphantasics are more prone to using the analytical strategy because they don't visualise. Not a question of being unaware but using a different strategy. Our data here support this although we didn't specifically test aphantasics.

Yes that's what the experiment meant by analytic strategy. Which is incidentally what I always used to do until i heard people talk about how MR is apparently an "obvious mental imagery" task. I have been trying visualising the rotation & realised that also works... 😉

Unfortunately I don't know where it was but that idea had been pretty much debunked right from the start.

I love this one. It's so compelling & predetermined compared to visual ambiguous images.

Pascal Wallisch (not sure if on here) had a paper arguing that this relates to individual differences in chronotypes (night owls vs larks). But this also only explained a small amount of the variability. It certainly doesn't explain my own white-gold percept...

New from Arnold @visnerd.bsky.social lab:

Mental rotation is often regarded as paradigmatic for #mentalimagery. But it turns out people often don't use imagery for mental rotation - & when they do it is often not useful (same viewpoint trials). #visionscience #psychscisky

doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

I don't have any login to Reddit and recently decided I best won't get myself one... 😏
But if you don't mind posting it there (or other communities I know they have on aphantasia & hyperphantasia) we'd certainly appreciate it!

Opinion piece now published as part of special issue in Neuropsychologia: #visionscience #neuroskyence #psychscisky #illusions doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Also, this happens to be my 100th publication. Join me for 🍺in OGH on Friday afternoon! 🙂

Thanks, that would be great to know. I assume you had tried pressing the button again when it wasn't moving. And you used the keyboard keys not touchscreen or some such?

Strange - this sounds like a browser issue with the platform. What system/browser are you running?

You mean the part where you're supposed to visualise the image first? It should first show you a rating scale with four options, and only then the vase-face image should appear where you press left or right.

Yes it's not meant to work on anything but computers (laptop etc).

I am sorry - that's very annoying. It is set up to only work on computers so I'm surprised the system actually lets you do. We will add a note about this in the info pages.

Thanks! Oddly I didn't get this on my laptop but I am getting this on my office computer. I'll have a look at that.

Yes I believe it only works on computers (laptop or desktop).

If you have 10-20 minutes (depends on how fast you are), would you please consider doing this online study on #mentalimagery? It contains a survey & an experiment where you look at pictures and you respond what you see:
#psychscisky #neuroskyence #visionscience

tstbl.co/820-917

Getting away from the metaphors again: despite everything I have said about the VVIQ, I think it's a much better measure for this science than using BR priming, pupil sizes, etc. I hope we can find better measures than VVIQ but using a noisy physiological measure is not it - and it's not "objective"

So if you can find that you can discriminate blue-seers from red-seers based on a determinable ground truth (e.g. brain response to red & blue stimuli), then this is meaningful. But what you -cannot- do is using people's brain patterns as an "objective" alternative to their self-report.

I agree this is an issue, but part of the issue is that this is an inherently subjective thing to study. You cannot get away from self-reports. If we can use this to distinguish neural or physiological correlates this is useful. The problem for me is the circularity, not using self-reports per se.

The issue of circularity is a big one that we have of course already discussed. I was planning to write about this too in the write-up of our survey study (data is there but the time for writing it isn't... 😏). Not sure this is exactly the same issue you are debating here though?

Yes that remains a fundamental issue and I certainly retain a high degree of scepticism - but I also am sceptical of disbelieving people can at least introspect their own mental experiences to some degree (certainly when distinguishing sensory modalities). But this field has its work cut out...