The latest visual trick making the rounds is an image of intersecting grey lines against a white background, with 12 black dots on the nodes where the grey lines meet. All 12 dots are really on ...

And with this regular pattern of gray lines on a white background, the brain guesses that there’ll just be more of the same, missing the intermittent black dots. Those dots disappear and ...

So when we stare at a black dot surrounded by a pattern of gray lines against a white background, our mind assumes what the intersection of the gray lines will look like without adding a black dot ...

featuring gray crisscrosses on a white background, with twelve black dots scattered throughout. But there’s no way you’ll see all the dots at once. The image above comes from a 2000 study on ...

Farther away, and the gray background drops almost to black. Adding a background light lets you create a gradient and can also blow out the background if you want to go fully white. Add color gels ...

the Heinz dilemma was presented on a black and white chequered background, whereas for participants in the control condition it was presented on a uniform grey background. The study found that ...