Ambiguous image

This figure can be seen as a young woman or an old woman; see My Wife and My Mother-in-Law.
Rubin's vase utilizes the concept of Negative space to create ambiguous images: the vase or two opposing faces.

Ambiguous images or reversible figures are visual forms that create ambiguity by exploiting graphical similarities and other properties of visual system interpretation between two or more distinct image forms. These are famous for inducing the phenomenon of multistable perception. Multistable perception is the occurrence of an image being able to provide multiple, although stable, perceptions.

One of the earliest examples of this type is the rabbit–duck illusion, first published in Fliegende Blätter, a German humor magazine.[1] Other classic examples are the Rubin vase,[2] and the "My Wife and My Mother-in-Law" drawing, the latter dating from a German postcard of 1888.

Ambiguous images are important to the field of psychology because they are often research tools used in experiments.[3] There is varying evidence on whether ambiguous images can be represented mentally,[4] but a majority of research has theorized that mental images cannot be ambiguous.[5]

  1. ^ Fliegende Blätter Oct. 23, 1892, p. 147
  2. ^ Parkkonen, L.; Andersson, J.; Hämäläinen, M.; Hari, R. (2008). "Early visual brain areas reflect the percept of an ambiguous scene". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 105 (51): 20500–20504. Bibcode:2008PNAS..10520500P. doi:10.1073/pnas.0810966105. PMC 2602606. PMID 19074267.
  3. ^ Wimmer, M.; Doherty, M. (2011). "The development of ambiguous figure perception: Vi. conception and perception of ambiguous figures". Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. 76 (1): 87–104. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5834.2011.00595.x.
  4. ^ Mast, F.W.; Kosslyn, S.M. (2002). "Visual mental images can be ambiguous: Insights from individual differences in spatial transformation abilities". Cognition. 86 (1): 57–70. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00137-3. PMID 12208651. S2CID 37046301.
  5. ^ Chambers, D.; Reisberg, D. (1985). "Can mental images be ambiguous?". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 11 (3): 317–328. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.11.3.317. S2CID 197655523.