It’s the viral Internet puzzle that has everyone talking – is this a lovely fluffy bunny enjoying a stroke, or is it another animal altogether?
Just when we were getting over the argument about whether that dress was white and gold, or black and blue, we are now tortured by the question of whether this video depicts a pet rabbit getting a scratch, or is it in fact a creature that’s usually far from cuddly?
WATCH: Look for yourself – What IS the animal in this viral video?
Social media has been alive with arguments over the identity of the animal, and we have the answer.
First appearing on Reddit and then being shared on social media by Dan Quintana, a senior researcher in biological psychiatry at the University of Oslo, it seems he was using us all in a clever experiment. Inspired by a classic drawing that has had people puzzling for decades if it depicts a rabbit or a duck, Dan saw the video online and gave that question a very modern reiteration.
‘I thought it was fairly clear that the video was of a bird… as you can see the translucent nictitating membrane sweep across the eye horizontally (rabbits don’t have membranes like this) and the positioning of the ‘ears’ are a little strange,’ he told the Huffington Post.
‘Because of this, I made the rabbit comment to prime people into thinking it was actually a rabbit.
‘I mentioned the nose in the text of the tweet, as the “ears” and eyes were the giveaways that this rabbit was a bird. When you only see the beak in your peripheral vision, it really seems like they’re ears. Without this misleading cue, I thought most people would have seen a bird.’
And it seems that he was right, with a lot of people being fooled into thinking the creature was a rabbit.
Quintana’s research includes ‘how context and attention can influence what we perceive in the world’, and says it was ‘fascinating to see that priming people with the thought of a rabbit was able to influence some people into actually *seeing* a rabbit (or at least second-guessing what they see).’
Well it seems that those of you who thought it was a rabbit will now have to eat crow.
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