Hidden Figures – Dalmatian Dog

From Michael’s “Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena”

What to do

Observe the picture on the right. Unless you are already familiar with this picture, in all likelihood it will not make sense. There are just black patches on a white background.

So the name of this is “Dalmatian dog”, does this help? If not, press the help button, starting with “help me 1”.

Comment

Once the dog has been seen, it stays obvious – one-shot learning has taken place.

This example once more demonstrates the amazing capability of our visual system to organise visual input into interpretable shape (with sometimes exaggerated results as shown by the “face on Mars”.

The movie in “help 2” further demonstrates how strongly texture segregation (separating figure from ground) is effected by motion gradients.

Sources

Gregory R (1970) “The intelligent eye” (Photographer: RC James)

for the movie I gratefully thank Wim van de Grind