The Coffer Illusion
Can the context in which we grow influence our perception of what we see? The theory of the “carpenter world”, proposed over 60 years ago, suggests yes.
For decades, scientists have discussed if people of different cultures see the world in fundamentally different ways. A recent study rekindled the controversy.
A team led by Ivan Crowdfrom London School of Economics, how people of different cultural origins respond to the illusion of the safe, a visual puzzle that can be seen as rectangles or circles.
Participants in the United Kingdom and the US perceived predominantly rectangles, while Rural Namibians saw circles more often.
Investigators suggest that this difference corroborates the hypothesis of “carpenter“, Proposed for over 60 years.
The idea is that the people of industrialized western societies surrounded by straight lines and straight angles develop distinct visual bias compared to those living in curves dominated environments, such as round huts in rural Namibia.
But one from 2015, by Dorsa Amir and Chaz Firestone, disputes this explanation by resorting to another classical illusion: that of Müller-Lyer. This illusion makes Two identical lines look unequal due to the arrow ends that point inside or out.
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MIDUS MENTE-LYER
Traditionally, it was believed that its effectiveness depended on cultural exposure to carpentry environments.
However, Amir and Firestone show that the Illusion also affects animalsfrom pigeons to bic fish as well as children who recently recovered their vision after they were born blind. These findings strongly suggest that illusion stems from universal brain mechanisms and not from cultural experience.
The apparent contradiction enhances the complexity of perception. It may be that different illusions bind to different processes, with some shaped by the attention and the environment and others intrinsically linked to biology. Critics also observe methodological differences between studiesas the way the stimuli were presented to the participants, the.
Despite the differences, the researchers agree to one point: perception is not a direct window to reality, but an active brain construction. “We don’t see things as they are, see them how we are“Author Anaïs Nin, citing the Talmud.
To deepen these issues, the Census of Perception, a major project led by the University of Sussex and the University of Glasgow, is collecting data from 40,000 participants in over 100 countries. With more than 50 experiments covering a wide range of permanent phenomena, researchers hope to build the most detailed map to the date of how humans experience the world, both between cultures and within them.
