The disappearing dots
Stare at the central dot without moving your eyes for about ten seconds. Watch the three yellow dots out of the corner of your eye.
The experiment starts as soon as the page has loaded (JavaScript is required).
Try the experiment: your result will appear here, next to what most people do.
What just happened (read it after the experiment)
What most people do: Most people see at least one dot disappear in less than ten seconds.
The yellow dots never leave the screen. Yet one, two or all three of them switch off now and then, and come back.
This is “motion-induced blindness,” described in 2001 by Yoram Bonneh and his colleagues. The rotating pattern pushes your brain to treat the still dots as flaws in the image, and to erase them.
Your awareness doesn’t receive everything your eyes pick up: some sorting happens first.
More experiments
Sources
- Yoram Bonneh, Alexander Cooperman and Dov Sagi, “Motion-induced blindness in normal observers,” Nature, 2001.