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This Optical Illusion Depends On Your Age According To Researchers

This Optical Illusion Depends On Your Age According To Researchers

Researchers working on an Australian study think that our own age-bias could subconsciously affect how we view this illustration.

Emma Rosemurgey

Emma Rosemurgey

First it was the blue and black or white and gold dress, then it was the weird Yannis or Laurel sound and now there's another optical illusion baffling the internet.

An illustration of a woman is doing the rounds called "My Wife or Mother-In-Law" and researchers claim that what you see in the image will reflect your age.

Viewers should either be able to see a young woman facing away or an older woman with a hook-nose facing towards the left.

Wikimedia Commons

For anyone who is struggling to see both women in the image, the younger woman's chin also doubles up as the older woman's nose, while the younger woman's ear doubles as the older woman's eye. Clever stuff.

The original image appeared on a German postcard, however a more well-known version of the illustration was drawn by William Ely Hill, a British cartoonist, and appeared in an American magazine called Puck, on 6th November 1915.

Now, researchers in Australia claim that which figure you see in the image is dependent on your age. The study, published by two psychology professors at Flinders University, claims that older people will notice the older woman first, while younger individuals will see the younger figure.

Wikimedia Commons

The study used 393 participants, 141 of which were women and 242 were men, aging from 18-years-old to 68-years-old with a median age of 32.

Participants were shown the image for half a second and were asked to decide the gender and age of the person they saw in the illustration.

The majority of people in the study saw the younger woman first which is thought to be because most of the people in the study were leaning towards the younger side.

To solidify this, researchers separated the oldest 10 per cent with the younger 10 per cent of people in the survey and found that the older people saw the older figure, while the younger people saw the younger figure.

The study was conducted to discover if "own-age biases affect the initial interpretation of an image at a subconscious level."

Is anyone else feeling really grateful for their youth after reading this?

Featured Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Topics: Life News, Real