Visual Anagrams: How They Reveal Human Perception
- This research represents a clever methodological advancement in the field of visual perception.
- New artificial intelligence-generated images that appear to be one thing, but something else entirely when rotated, are helping scientists test the human mind.
- The work by Johns Hopkins University perception researchers addresses a longstanding need for uniform stimuli to rigorously study how people mentally process visual information.
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AI-Generated Visual Anagrams Help Scientists Study the Human Mind
New artificial intelligence-generated images that appear to be one thing, but something else entirely when rotated, are helping scientists test the human mind.
The work by Johns Hopkins University perception researchers addresses a longstanding need for uniform stimuli to rigorously study how people mentally process visual information.
“these images are really significant as we can use them to study all sorts of effects that scientists previously thought were nearly impossible to study in isolation-everything from size to animacy to emotion,” says first author Tal Boger, a phd student studying visual perception.
“Not to mention how fun they are to look at,” adds senior author Chaz Firestone, who runs the university’s Perception & Mind Lab.
The team adapted a new AI tool to create “visual anagrams.” An anagram is a word that spells something else when its letters are rearranged. Visual anagrams are images that look like something else when rotated. The visual anagrams the team created include a single image that is both a bear and a butterfly, another that is an elephant and a rabbit, and a third that is both a duck and a horse.
“This is an important new kind of image for our field,” says Firestone. “If something looks like a butterfly in one orientation and a bear in another-but it’s made of the exact same pixels in both cases-then we can study how people perceive aspects of images in a way that hasn’t really been possible before.”
The findings appear in Current Biology.
The team ran initial experiments exploring how people perceive the real-world size of objects. Real-world size has posed a longstanding puzzle for perception scientists, as one can never be certain if subjects are reacting to an object’s size or to some other more subtle visual property like an object’s shape, color, or fuzziness.
“Let’s say we want