‘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.