Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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  • http://twitter.com/Pen_Bird Phlip

    inb4 Monty Python’s Confuse-a-Cat episode! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2Je1CEPkUM

  • franko

    as a cat owner, that cat is TOTALLY being fooled by that optical illusion.

    sidebar rant: what is the point of me clicking “remember me” upon login when YOU NEVER DO?

    • Boundegar

      Agree, that cat looks like it sees a bug.  And yea, WordPress has been doing that to me too.  I didn’t take it personally.

    • Daemonworks

       Boing Boing has never managed to remember me for any significant length of time. :(

    • dasanjos

      Don’t worry Franko, we readers will always remember you…

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000266687773 Jim Wile

    I had a Physics text book with this same illusion as part of the cover.  Every cat I lived with attacked that illusion like it was a jumping bug!  Hours of fun with kittens – the older cats would ignore it if I was in the room.  I had to toss the book after one male left his editorial comment about the illusion.  ”Fool me once – shame on you.  Fool me twice – shame on me.  Fool me fourteen zillion times – I piss on you!”

  • Cowicide

    Print this out and see if they fall for it…….. I created this fractal some years ago and many humans seem to fall for it……  http://i.imgur.com/0DZN2.gif

    • Isaac Rinke

      I printed out the .gif. It don’t get it. /sarcasm.

    • look_alive

      Wait a minute, though.  That’s not an “optical illusion”.  That’s an animated GIF.  When I take a screenshot of it, it no longer “moves”.  How would printing it out be any different. 

      Edit: well, apparently *I* fell for it! Doh!

      • Cowicide

        Fractals lose their resolution during the screenshot process. Try dragging and dropping the fractal picture to your Desktop, then right-click the picture and send it directly from there to your printer for printing. Stare at that printed image. If that image doesn’t move, then the fractal has lost its resolution during the printing process. Upgrade your printer to this Epson printer from Amazon at this link. Please give Amazon my affiliate marketing number: 54734 when you make this purchase. Enjoy your illusions!

      • Ipo

         You have to print all frames, bind them and flip the pages with your thumb. 

    • Antinous / Moderator

      I see Santa Claus riding a shark.

      • Cowicide

        I thought you stopped with the bath salts!

  • Glen Able

    I’m surprised this works – I know cats have different colour vision to us (I daren’t describe it as “inferior” in this place!)

    Maybe we need an iPad app with an evolutionary algorithm that produces random variations on the pattern.  It could keep track of how much it gets attacked when it’s displaying each one?

  • fuzzyfuzzyfungus

    It seems like we could answer this question by tapping the cat’s brain directly to determine whether it is ‘seeing’ the illusory motion or not.

  • schmaltastic

    What would make it all scientifical isn’t just more cat videos, it’s a negative control.  Is there a diagram as similar to this as possible but without the illusion?  Then we just need to observe differential behavior towards the two diagrams for different cats.  If the negative control was very similar to the illusion, this could be quite convincing either way.

    • billstewart

      There’s also the problem that some cats are dumb, and some will chase anything, and some don’t care much for chasing.  One of my cats would lick the paper, at least if you use a wax-type printer.  Another of my cats would decide that if you think the paper is interesting to look at, he should go sit on it (he also didn’t like laser pointers.)

      • http://twitter.com/Moriash Nathan

         I had a cat that was deathly afraid of laser pointers. Would run into the other room at the first glimmer.  Of course, it was also afraid of that ululating alien opera themesong from Farscape.  I think this is proof of feline alien abduction.

    • http://www.facebook.com/diana.issidorides Diana Issidorides

      http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/rotsnakes15e.html
      (both experimental and control images) :-)

      • http://www.facebook.com/people/John-Aguirre/10601304 John Aguirre

         Wow … the internet really does have everything.

  • theophrastvs

    one should hypothesize the difference between human perception (feelings, misapprehensions, loves, annoyances) and higher animal X is 0.0 until shown otherwise  (note: this haphazard heuristic is the exact opposite of what i was taught in “Psychology as a Natural Science 231″)  next up: how does a dog feel about fingernails on a blackboard? [head-cock]

    • http://www.edmstudio.com futnuh

      I asked my dog, he said fingernails on the blackboard don’t bother him.  He also said the “head cock” is a non-verbal equivalent of “What you talking bout Willis?”.  Next question.

  • http://twitter.com/Moriash Nathan

    And then we can find one of those counting horses, and ask if it sees two bars or three!

  • Daemonworks

    A way to improve the test… put the paper under glass

  • Tony

    Just tried it with my cat and she either can’t see it or (more likely) doesn’t care:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMgGBxLULXk

    • Antinous / Moderator

      What a beautiful cat.

  • Snig

    My cat, who used to hunt flies, was tricked once when I made a convincing sound of a fly coming from my mouth.  He tried to peer inside my mouth to get at the noise.  Thereafter, any time I tried it, he’d just look at me with contempt.  

    • Antinous / Moderator

      You should try yogic bee breath. That sounds like a two-pound mosquito.

      • timquinn

        it was the tuna sandwich, anyway. Fly sound was just a coincidence.

    • howaboutthisdangit

      I had a cat who would respond when I cupped my hand over my mouth and made a squeaky, high-pitched whistle.  I guess she thought I was eating a mouse; the first couple of times I did it she came up and examined my hand and mouth VERY closely.  After that she was no longer fooled, but she treated it as a “come here” type of call.

  • http://techdweeb.com univac
  • Preston Sturges

    Kittens attack anything and nothing,  so it seems like they are living just this side hallucination much of the time anyway. 

  • Wooster

    Both of my cats were unimpressed by the sheet of paper. On the theory that the printout was too low resolution, or the colors were off, I showed it to them on an iPad. They didn’t notice anything. They do react to cat-toy apps on the iPad, so I’d say this was a bust.

  • lanzz

    Even if they are fooled, that would be only because that was their plan from the beginning. With cats everything is intentional.

  • http://www.facebook.com/diana.issidorides Diana Issidorides

    Dear Boing Boing,

    Have just been discussing this “cat effect’ with the creator of the Rotating Snakes illusion, Akiyoshi Kitaoka. He correctly points out that you need a control condition. He has provided a control image here:
    http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/rotsnakes15e.html

    Cat owners should test their cats with both images!

    Cheers, Diana

  • http://twitter.com/ivanjones Ivan Jones

    Cool, Think I’ll use this as my screensaver. ;)

  • Fogbert

    Our cat simply laid down on the paper.

    Not sure what that means other than we have a lazy cat.

  • http://twitter.com/AwesomeRobot AwesomeRobot

    I’m generally convinced that the first few months of a cat’s life is like one long LSD trip. They spend the rest of their lives coming down and occasionally falling into flashbacks.

  • http://twitter.com/Listener43 Listener43

    Who was that guy saying boing boing didn’t remember him?

  • http://twitter.com/jam19611 JAM61

    Just goes to show how intellectually superior cats are to dogs. While the cat is fooled by the illusion, at least it knows there’s an illusion. A dog will simply go over to the paper, try to eat it, and move on….. Probably to pee somewhere….

  • thermidorthelobster

    Never mind the cat – my girlfriend doesn’t see the vast majority of illusions on that page.

  • Majd Al-shihabi

    And then we win an Ig Nobel prize. 

  • disky00

    I wish more college lectures would contain the sentence “And that brings us to this kitten video”.

  • moonbird

    3 cats: 1 supergenius, 1 neurotic, 1 “special.” None of the triad duped by snakes on a (smooth) plane.