### An optical illusion used as a psychological test of human perception 

Is it a duck, or is it a rabbit? Sketched by an unknown artist and first published in the Munich-based weekly satirical magazine _Fliegende Blätter_ (Flying Leaves) on October 23, 1892 (and in the U.S Harper's Weekly a month later), the duck-rabbit drawing was first used in 1899 to test how we perceive our environment by the U.S. psychologist **Joseph Jastrow** (1863-1944), who referred to it as a piece of "ingenious conceit."

![547px-Kaninchen_und_Ente.svg.png](https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmPnXvttYJMLeZ5CarQ451Ny9EXvrVKDVYV4f28EqC38kw)

The Jastrow version of the duck-rabbit illusion is technically more of an ambiguity than the original, more a reversible or "bi-stable" figure than a true illusion. But whatever you call it, it is one of the best-known images devised for testing a person's perceptive acumen, along with the Schroeder staircase, which simultaneously looks equally convincing the right way up and upside-down, and the Necker cube, which spontaneously reverses in perspective as it is viewed.


How does the duck-rabbit illusion work in terms of research? When scrutinised in a controlled situation, the eye tends to be led to the lines that compose the image, rather than to the image itself. It is the lines that we see and try to interpret, the image being the "lure." The lines are then seen alternately as representing a duck and/or a rabbit. It is a psychological tool, used to measure how we make sense of our environment by organising incoming sensory stimuli.

![JastrowDuckFliegende_Full.jpg](https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jfkihlstrom/images/Jastrow/JastrowDuckFliegende_Full.jpg)


can interpretation of the image be used as a measure of intelligence? Is our speed at recognising both images, our ability to flip our own perception easily from duck to rabbit, and vice versa, a measure of our own creativity? Studies have shown that test participants who are able to see both interpretations quickly tend to be more creative than those who initially struggle to make sense of the image; Once the latter group "see" the image, they find it difficult to hold to any one interpretation. The duck becomes the rabbit, and the rabbit, the duck.
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Source:
"1001 Ideas That Changed the Way We Think"
-- by Robert Arp.
[Image Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit-duck_illusion)

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