This one has been circulating the net lately, so it would be shame if I didn’t share it with you guys as well. What is the story behind the picture below? The influence of culture and environment can have an effect on our visual perception – believe it or not. This theory was first explored by Robert Laws, a Scottish missionary working in Africa during the late 1800’s. Take a look at the picture below – what you see will largely depend on where you live in the world. After that you have examined the picture, scroll below for a more detailed explanation. Original article can be found here.
So What Did You See – What is above the woman’s head? When scientists showed a similar sketch to people from East Africa, nearly all the participants in the experiment said she was balancing a box or metal can on her head. In a culture containing few angular visual cues, the family is seen sitting under a tree. Westerners, on the other hand, are accustomed to the corners and boxlike shapes of architecture. They are more likely to place the family indoors and to interpret the rectangle above the woman’s head as a window through which shrubbery can be seen.
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not much of an optical illusion but it poses an interesting social and cultural question.
amazing… i saw the window.. and i dont really think i would ever think of it as anything else…
but the conclusion is very interesting.. great one.. well done
Very interesting. :)
wow! thats bizzre but cool!
p.s. what happened to mighty magic trixs???
awesome thing
Whoa…
I DID see a window…
i get it and yet i dont get it x.
wow, that is the dumbest thing i’ve ever seen. take you a degree to figure out the inferences made by individual cultures? kill yourself.
A good idea for this illusion would be to state your country before you post. You know, to help others understand what you see.
United States
I see a family in a room, but instead of a window, a picture in a frame.
KOOL!!!! I’m the first one to comment! I live in the western world so I totally thought they were indoors, and there was a window. I love these kinds of physcological tests!
This is pretty cool. I saw the “window” but after a while i could see the others too. Pretty Neat
I saw that.
And the dog depending how you look at it can look like a goat. Goats are prised in third world counries for milk and seling for money.
Also the people on the left look like the are wearing kimonoes. If you look for it.
i saw indoors, and a window… i’d have to take your word on the under a tree box on the head idea… i don’t see it, i guess it’s possible people of other cultures would?
one of the best ever
i would never imagine that!
very interesting
It is true. I live in the US and I thought it was the inside of a hourse with a window. Really cool.
That is such a strange way to look at this picture. I wonder if it was meant to be seen like it is.
I found the explanation of this interesting, as I saw it as they were sitting in a “room with a window”. I don’t understand how people thinking they were sitting under a tree would explain away the “box” above her head, especially as it has ” interior depth” yet no outside width.
i saw it as a painting nice…
See, I saw it and thought they were indoors merely because the man was sitting in a chair. I guess theoretically they could be sitting outside, but my first instinct is to guess indoors.
I see a dog growing out a man’s side. Weird.
Ahhh… very interesting…
definitely a window! or a box with a small plant on the wall, and the ‘tree’, i see it as a pillar in the corner!
the first one! well, what i see in this picture is a family that is indoors. Its kindda weird to think that the woman is balancing a box and they are under a tree..
Interessting, even the people look like they could be either black or white. Very good one
Wowo, That’s Awesome!
This isnt an optical illusion.
I’m sick of these non-illusions.
You are off my homepage.
This is very true, Culture are different, I saw it as a window.
Wow, nice one. I placed the family indoors when I first saw it.
The corner is weird, but it looks like a corner.
wow! im really impresed with the comment more than the picture obviously, this is when our empiric sense comes to play… and plays with our mind… i think that is a very good psyco-visual illusion :)
really like this one (if you get the idea of how important is this small thing in the developmetn)
There appears to be a bit more to this illusion. All six characters seem to be intertwined in pairs and there is perhaps a distinct racial difference in all 3 couples which may also trick the brain from a cultural perspective.
It’s a window; it can never be a box, because the visible angles do not match the perspective, not by a fucking mile.
I think its lame.
This is stupid!!
Indeed. I saw that the family was inside of a room first. More over, at the begining I thought that the family is “european”, but after reading the last part of your comment you can easily imagine them being from Africa seating under a tree. Or not? :)
I saw the window/box as a box first then a window, I didn’t think the scribble at the top to be a tree thou. Other than that I can see a gay couple and a lesbian couple, then two kids (Presumably why the two families have met).
Then there’s a dog.
That all are true and interesting . Just not sure that is illusion.
thats sooo cool! Its also reeaaally interesting :D
Personally, It looked to me like a family being held captive. I did not notice window or tree, just that some seem to have arms behind in submission, and some do not. That is what is what I see first.
its a window. the angle of the top left corner is not angeled like a box would. it clearl shows as the inside of the wall(box would be 45 degs to the right.
westerners rule !!!!
I saw a sailboat and three pumpkins.
this is a really interesting piece, good job!
All I could focus on was that freakin Kangaroo. What the hell is he doing hanging out with those people!
all this shows to me is that the countries mentioned must have some kind of visual-spatial or artistic impairment. It is definately a window, there is no other interpretation. It is clearly drawn as a opening in a ‘wall-like’ solid. The ‘tree’ would have to be an incredibly naive drawing to be a tree. Taking into account the relative accuracy of the people it would most logically be interpreted as an interior corner of a room (even the shading of the horizontal ceiling plane verifys this).
I can see the other interpretations, but they are obviously not just ‘alternative’, but flawed and incorrect. The drawing needs to be more naive and less precise in its rending of the scene to work in this context.
This test would show: lack of artistic knowledge, lack of visual awareness, and lack of basic logic skills.
How could it be a box on her head? It very plainly is not, although it could be with the alteration of a few lines.
Not an illusion, and is a crap non-illusion at that. First time here, and won’t be back.
Nonsense. That can’t be a box, the perspective is wrong. And a tree!? Fair enough maybe not the corner of a room. This just proves that people who think differently to me are wrong.
ooo.
i saw both the first time.
at first it was the room,
but when i focused on the window, the corner seemed to look like a tree, and that the box was balanced ont he lady’s head.
interesting..
well sorry to say, but it has to be a window. to assume it was a box, makes throws out all the angles, you’re basically saying the artist can’t draw.
I get the idea of it, but when you see how well the rest of the drawing is done, the “box on head theory” fall down, that’s not down to my origin, it’s down to understanding perspective.
hey i just wanted to do the 100th comment… it seems we all agree it’s more a box than a window!
as an art student i can argue that the box above the woman is a window because it’s draw in perspective to the corner, which if was meant to be a tree is a rather poorly drawn tree. if they were outdoors, what is the purpose of the single tree in the background leaving everything else white with out a background and middle ground? that lack displaces the people. but assuming theres a window and corner, the picture makes sense.
so unless im totally not doing my job, and thers some crazy symbolism of people outdoors balancing a box under a tree…they gotta be inside