How Our Brains Flip the Interpretation of Spinning Human Figures

What is it about?

Have you ever seen an animation of a spinning dancer that suddenly seems to change direction? This mind-bending effect, known as a reversal, is at the heart of a new study exploring how we perceive motion in ambiguous spinning figures—both rigid shapes and human-like walkers made of moving dots. Researchers investigated why and how our perception flips between different interpretations of these spinning figures. They found that human-like figures made of point-light dots (like stick figures in motion) reverse direction in our minds more often than rigid human shapes. Interestingly, we’re much more likely to see these dot-walkers as facing us when they’re upright—a quirk known as the "facing-the-viewer" (FTV) bias. The study also revealed that reversals happen less frequently when the figures don’t just spin on the spot but also move forward in a circle, like they're walking around a track. This suggests that the type of motion—lifelike walking versus simple rotation—plays a big role in how stable our perception is. The takeaway? Our brains rely on past experiences and expectations—like how we usually see people walking upright and tend to focus on people facing toward us—to interpret ambiguous visuals. These findings give us new insights into how motion, shape, and experience combine to shape what we think we see.

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Photo by Laura Cleffmann on Unsplash

Photo by Laura Cleffmann on Unsplash