Set amongst a row of sculptures in front of the businesses at Youngstorget Square, this piece has no sign to reveal the title, artist or date.
The viewer first sees the image of a face which appears normal and convex...but in actuality, the sculpture is concave and the image is an illusion. In this case, the sculpture is about 5 feet tall and the woman's face is presented in 3/4 profile.
Wikipedia (
visit link) article on such illusions informs us:
"The Hollow-Face illusion (also known as Hollow-Mask illusion) is an optical illusion in which the perception of a concave mask of a face appears as a normal convex face.
While a convex face will appear to look in a single direction, and a flat face such as the Lord Kitchener Wants You poster can appear to follow the moving viewer, a hollow face can appear to move its eyes faster than the viewer: looking forward when the viewer is directly ahead, but looking at an extreme angle when the viewer is only at a moderate angle.
Says Richard Gregory, "The strong visual bias of favouring seeing a hollow mask as a normal convex face is evidence for the power of top-down knowledge for vision".[1] This bias of seeing faces as convex is so strong it counters competing monocular depth cues, such as shading and shadows, and also very considerable unambiguous information from the two eyes signalling stereoscopically that the object is hollow. (Lighting a concave face from below to reverse the shading cues making them closer to those of a convex face lit from above can reinforce the illusion.)
The Hollow-Face illusion has been used to study the dissociation between vision-for-perception and vision-for-action (see Two-streams hypothesis).[2] In this experiment,[3] people used their finger to make a quick flicking movement at a small target attached to the inside surface of the hollow – but apparently normal – face, or on the surface of a normal protruding face. The idea was that the fast flicking (rather like flicking a small insect off the face) would engage the vision-for-action networks in the dorsal stream – and thus would be directed to the actual rather than the perceived position of the target. The results were clear. Despite the presence of a robust illusion in which people perceived the hollow face as if it were a normal protruding face, the flicking movements they made were accurately directed to the real, not the illusory location of the target. This result suggests that the bottom-up cues that drive the flicking response are distinct from the top-down cues that drive the Hollow-Face illusion."