On each trial, look at the highlighted part of the image and briefly describe what you think it is.
There are no trick questions, and there is no need to overthink your response—just write what it most naturally looks like to you.
Trial 1 of 4
Open response
Natural scene judgements
Describe the object as you would naturally name it.
After the final trial, you’ll see a summary of your responses.
Your responses
Here are the objects as they appeared in context, together with your responses.
After that, the demonstration reveals something important about the images you just saw.
The reveal
In every trial, the highlighted region contained the same ambiguous visual input.
What changed was the surrounding scene.
The same patch can be experienced as different things when context changes what the visual system expects or makes most plausible.
Why this matters
Vision is not a simple readout of the retinal image. The sensory input reaching the eyes is often incomplete or ambiguous, and the brain has to interpret it.
This is part of the inverse problem in perception: the same proximal input can be consistent with multiple possible objects or events in the world. Context, prior knowledge, and expectation help constrain that interpretation.
Demonstrations like this show that perception is constructive. What we experience is shaped not only by sensory evidence, but also by the wider scene in which that evidence is embedded.