My Wife and My Mother-in-Law

My wife and my mother in law (English: My Wife and My Mother -in -Law) is one of the most famous optical illusions.

The drawing by cartoonist William Hill Ely (1887-1962) first appeared in 1915 in Puck magazine, a U.S. satirical magazine, which was influenced by the British Punch.

Description

The specialty of this semantically ambivalent picture is that it can be seen either as a representation of an old or a young woman, as neither the meaning of the individual image components is still their ratio fixed to each other. This means that the figure-ground relationship / the figure-ground perception is constantly changing and that the viewers have two alternatives of perception. Thus, the viewer will see either a young, looking backwards woman or an old woman looking to the left.

An additional ear ring road, take the young woman exercise easier. By small circles instead of the black wedge which then acts like a row of teeth, and omitting the batting and the nose of the young woman rather the image of the old woman appears.

History

Hills drawing is always displayed in the publications about the psychology of perception, in particular the Gestalt psychology. It was popularized by the psychologist Edwin Boring, who first described in an article in the American Journal of Psychology, and so in the 1930s made ​​known in circles of psychologists. According to EC Boring this drawing is referred to in English as Boring figure. The designation Boring figure has nothing boring ( "boring" ) with the English word do.

1961 drew Jack Botwinick based on this drawing a picture with male persons, which he My husband and my father in law (English: My husband and my father -in-law ) called.

Hill has this but not invented, as it dates back to earlier French and German models. A German postcard from 1888 is the oldest known representation.

Importance

The psychology of perception underscores this drawing their theory that in mind, not depictions of external phenomena arise, and used to this and other ambiguous figures, different situations can be read into the two. On a web page of the University of Ulm it means to the operation of the so-called Boring Women:

This picture proves without much theoretical ballast the fundamental mode of neuronal attractors. We can distinguish two different motifs in the point pattern, from which the image is formed, see: An old woman and a young woman. In this way, the recognition motifs of the neural system "dressed". It is essential that our perceptual system can autonomously switch back and forth between the two options. Like other images, such as the Necker cube show it is not directly influence the will, which image is just seen.