Hollow face mask illusion

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR9WVhiaIeY[/youtube]

How many people see the concave side as convex? I do.

Research suggests that it's related to the person's mental state in schizophrenia (i.e. the more positive symptoms, the greater need for structure, and the more inappropriate the person's affect is, then less fooled they are by the illusion):

http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/pylysh ... urnAbn.pdf

Successfully treating schizophrenia appears to make the illusion go away:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11728843

I wonder how common it is on the spectrum, however.

I see it as convex as well. Is that supposed to be a positive for schizo-effective disorder?

Actually, the opposite. Seeing it correctly as concave is a state-related marker for psychosis, schizophrenia in particular. State-related meaning relating to the way the mind is at a certain point in time.

However, if the person with schizophrenia is being treated and is not psychotic, then they will be fooled by the illusion, too, according to the sources in I posted in the OP.

Healthy people tend to be fooled by the illusion.

I misread your post, now I understand. It is an interesting illusion. Even if I cover one eye or the other or look away and then back, the concave pops right back to convex. I can't beat the illusion.

I am fooled by the illusion. I don't have Schizophrenia anyway.

This one I was not as fooled by, as I could tell the hair and nose were concave, easily:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObNHHwB8OQg[/youtube]

I was fooled by it too.

To me, both look like faces with neutral-to-pensive expresses. The first one is Roman like, the 2nd one looks a little like Jimmy Carter.

I was fooled by this. To me it looks like the face was popping out at me.

Does that mean that of your not fooled by it. Your schizophrenic, right?

People with schizophrenia are less likely to be fooled by it, especially during the active phases of their illness, but I don't think either way means you are or aren't.

It's believed to be related to bottom-up processing not getting feedback from top-down processing where you don't get fooled. I would think that on the spectrum, a lot of people have more bottom-up processing.

Interesting. I can experience the illusion either way, and with a little mental effort "flip" it from concave to convex and back. I can also "turn off" the tendency to see 3-d and see it as flat pixels on a computer screen.

I am autistic but not schizophrenic, with some minor visual and auditory sensory processing problems.

I've taken a class in sensation and perception--the psychology aspect of it, how the brain processes sensory stimuli--and I was interested to find out that my sensory processing is slightly more "low-level" than that of my classmates. I get the same data, but conscious interpretation starts earlier than theirs does, and the whole process is slower.

I test in the "you need hearing aids" range when I take an auditory discrimination test (trying to hear the signal in the noise), but my hearing sensitivity is normal. I haven't yet found a similar test for vision, though I do know I am flooded by irrelevant detail just like I am with auditory information.

What I learned in class was that there are two basic types of illusions--one comes from the physical machinery of how you see things (for example, the optical after-image you get after you stare at something for a while), and the other comes from how you interpret things (for example, a Necker cube seen as 3D and flipping from one orientation to the other, because you are used to seeing 3D cubes).

I wonder if maybe autistic people have to work harder (mentally) to experience illusions like the face/mask illusion, because we don't immediately "throw out" the data that the NT would judge to be irrelevant right away.

If we were to test somebody with really severe auditory/visual processing problems, or someone whose problems were momentarily severe because of some type of stress (sleep deprivation would work, I think)... would we find that these people do not experience some of those higher-level illusions at all, seeing them merely as raw data (the "pixels on a computer screen" version)? Would they still experience low-level illusions that depend simply on the physical machinery of a person's eyes and brain?

For obvious reasons I have never thought to test myself on whether I experience optical illusions mid-meltdown, but I do know that my surroundings seem to become meaningless. Maybe some of that has to do with shutting down high-level processing such as the sort that sees that rotating face and thinks, "Hmm, I'm more used to seeing faces than the insides of masks, so this must be a face."

I also saw it as a convex. I wonder what NTs see it as.

It looks to me as if it is popping out at me, as a mask should in you were viewing it from the outside.

I don't know if that's because the illusion puts the shadows where the shadows should be and the brain fills in the rest, or if it's because I expect to see a regular mask and therefore my brain sees what it is "supposed" to see.

I know that I tend to be pretty vulnerable to suggestion; generally I have to "put my game eyes on" when I know I am going to be dealing with people who are going to try to use the power of suggestion to fool me, make a sale, etc.

I must be really dumb today, I can't understand the question in relation to the clip.
I understood it in the second video, but the first one just confused me.

Ho that Charlie is so cute!

I get fooled by this one:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbKw0_v2clo[/youtube]