People in this career are better at seeing through optical illusions

Optical illusions are great fun, and they fool virtually everyone. But have you ever wondered if you could train yourself to unsee these illusions? Our latest research suggests that you can. Optical illusions tell a lot about how people see things. For example, look at the picture below. The two orange circles are identical, but the one on the right looks bigger. Why? We use context to figure out what we are seeing. Something surrounded by smaller things is often quite big. Our visual system takes context into account, so it judges the orange circle on the right as bigger than the one on the left. This illusion was discovered by German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus in the 19th century. This and similar geometrical illusions have been studied by psychologists ever since. How much you are affected by illusions like these depends on who you are. For example, women are more affected by the illusion than men—they see things more in context. Younger children do not see illusions at all ... Read full article.