Shifting your focus could help you overcome the trickery of optical illusions
By Carissa Wong
14 March 2025
Did you spot that the orange circle on the left is smaller than the one on the right?
Radoslaw Wincza et al. (2025)
Optical illusions may make you feel like a fool, but you could be able to train your brain to resist them.
“It is very likely that people from the general population have the capacity to be trained to unsee illusions and perceive the world more objectively,” says Radoslaw Wincza at Lancaster University, UK.
Read more
Mathematicians discover shape that can tile a wall and never repeat
Advertisement
Wincza and his colleagues recruited 44 radiologists, with an average age of 36, who had spent more than a decade spotting small details such as fractures in medical scans. They also looked at 107 university students, average age 23, who were studying medicine or psychology.
Each participant was shown four illusions on a screen, one at a time. In each illusion, the participant saw pairs of shapes or lines of slightly different sizes or lengths, and had to select the larger or longer one.
In three of the illusions, other objects made the larger shape or longer line appear to be the smaller or shorter one. The team found that radiologists were less susceptible to these illusions than the students.