General, Research, Technology

Reptiles see optical illusions just like humans

Mid-2019 on the Interneta photograph spread, which every person perceived in his own way. For example, someone claimed that it was colored, but someone thought it was black and white with colored lines. Such images, which can deceive human vision, are called optical illusions and have been known to people for several thousand years. They work on people because of the rather complex structure of human eyes, which have blind spots and other features. Optical illusions can also deceive the eyes of other animals like monkeys, but earlier no one could even suggest that even reptile lizards react to them in the same way. But they do not at all have developed vision with a complex structure.

Lizards can be fooled by optical illusion

About the unexpected discovery made by Italianby scientists, it was told in a scientific journal called Journal of Comparative Psychology. According to the researchers, the eyes of some reptiles can be deceived by at least Delbef's well-known optical illusion. It was first depicted in the 19th century and consists of two filled circles of the same size, which are surrounded by large and small rings. When viewing this image, it seems to people that the filled circle inside the large ring is smaller than the second circle. But in fact they are exactly the same.

Delphi's Illusion

How to deceive eyesight?

Previously, scientists found that on this opticalbesides people, monkeys also react to the illusion. The discovery was made during the experiment, where two identical plates of food were placed in front of the primates. The only thing that distinguished them was the radius of the circle drawn around each saucer. Researchers suggested that if the monkeys first approached the plate inside the small circle, then their eyesight was deceived. And so it happened - the animals came precisely to a small circle, because the plate inside it seemed to them large.

Bearded Agama (Pogona vitticeps)

In about the same way, Italian scientiststested the performance of the illusion on reptiles. Their test involved 12 bearded agamas (Pogona vitticeps) and 8 land coal turtles (Chelonoidis carbonaria). In the first part of the experiment, they were presented with two identical plates with vegetable puree, which was laid out in the form of circles with a diagonal of 4.9 and 1.8 centimeters. As expected, the reptiles first approached the plate where there is more food.

Coral Turtle (Chelonoidis carbonaria)

Do you know about the existence of a natural optical illusion called “magnetic hill”?

Delphi’s illusion was recreated onlyin the second part of the study. This time, plates of different sizes were placed in front of the animals, and the portion of food was the same. The effect worked perfectly on the lizards - their eyesight was clearly deceived and they first approached a small plate. And this despite the fact that the same amount of food was placed in a large plate.

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Only the turtles, for some reason, do notthey began to sort out which plate of food more and went to both plates in a scattered manner. Perhaps this is due to the fact that their vision is not as good as that of lizards. It follows from this that far from all reptiles can be deceived by optical illusions.