maybe it's an evolutionary quirk where anything in periphery view could be a potential threat and this is our brains way of trying to shift our focus onto that potentially dangerous thing
I think it has something to do with persistence of vision like with how we perceive tv and film to be moving, but they’re just rapid stills. In this case your brain is attempting to connect the faces together as one object, but as they flash to different images the size and location of features changes so what you perceive is not the actual face but a morph between them. When you look instead at the faces and not the dot, your conscious mind perceives that the faces are actually different and thus no distortion.
Yeah that was my first thought, I've seen a similar trick many times where you look at a dot in the middle of a weird color blob that suddenly switches to a black and white picture, and your brain keeps something similar to the color from the blob (altered by the shading of the new picture) and you see a full color photo instead of a black and white image for a bit. Same principle probably applies here, the staring at the dot keeps your eyes from moving around and ruining the persistence of the image and the former faces blend into the new ones and look a bit uncanny
I covered half the screen and looked slightly away from the images on one side and the effect still happens. It doesn’t have to do with the brain trying to connect them.
This sounds like the right avenue for further study, because the illusion specifies that the eyes need to be in the same location. Eye facades are very common in animal and bug camouflage patterns and we anthropomorphize anything that vaguely looks like eyes.
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u/xixtoo Feb 07 '25
This illusion is called the flashed face distortion effect