The Rarer it is, the more we see it – Human mind gets duped
A new optical-illusion study in the Journal Science dooms humans to a life of sadness and bad decisions through an exercise involving participants who are asked to identify shades of blue and purple among a wide spectrum of the two colours.
In the study, which was published on June 29, a team of scientists from Harvard, Dartmouth and New York University showed several groups of American college students a series of 1,000 dots that started at very blue and ended at very purple. The participants were asked a single definitive question – is the dot blue or purple?
The initial minutes of the test yielded simple and expected results. For the first 200 dots, the participants identified almost equal numbers of blue and purple dots and most participants recognized the differences quite deftly. Then, across the 800 other dots, the amount of blue dots were significantly reduced and this actually proved to be counterintuitive.
As the blue dots got rarer. participants began to see blue dots in the purple shades. And moreover, in the final 200 trials, the first 200 were shown and previously purple dots were now seen as blue. The participants continued mistaking purple dots for blue ones even when they were specifically warned that the number of blue dots was going to decrease or when they were offered a $10 reward for responding to repeated colours the same way at the end of the study as they did at the beginning of the study.
So, what caused the changes in perception? According to the researchers, it could be that the human brain doesn’t make decisions based on cold, hard rules, but rather on prior stimuli. As the balance of blue-to-purple dots shifted, the participants expanded their definition of what “blue” really looked like in order to match the expectations formed from the earlier trials.
Now a follow-up experiment was carried out in which the coloured dots were replaced with computer-generated faces and the participants had to choose between threatening and non-threatening and the result yielded was the same as before, thus showing the implications of this flawed decision-making process on real-world situations.
