Curvature Blindness Illusion

Curvature Blindness Illusion

A new article published int he journal, i-Perception presents a new optical illusion called “curvature blindness illusion”.  It is written by a researcher, Kohske Takahashi.

Look at the image below.  You can see in the top left on the white background, every set of lines has the same curve.  However, when viewed against the gray background, the lines where the top curve is black and the bottom curve is white still look rounded, while the lines where each curve is half-black and half-white look like sharp angles:

curvature blindness illusion

Do you see sharp lines?  Takahashi explains the reasoning behind this as our brain’s default to seeing corners rather than curves when it gets confused.

The underlying mechanisms for the gentle curve perception and those of obtuse corner perception are competing with each other in an imbalanced way and the percepts of corner might be dominant in the visual system.

This is very similar to the illusion of bent lines.  But on the curvature blindness illusion is a play on contrasting colors in the background.

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