Visual Anagrams: How They Reveal Human Perception

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