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I Love Science

Valentine's Day Science...

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOpMxdx2EjM]

What is happening?

When your sight is fixed on a certain point, visual stimuli in your peripheral vision will fade away and disappear after about 20 seconds or so.

In this experiment, your sight is fixated on the + at the middle of the screen. As your brain becomes focused on that point, the pink dots in your periphery slowly fade and finally disappear.

The effect is easy to do in this particular experiment because of the low amount of contrast between the light pink dots and the gray background.

Some of you may have seen green dots after the image changed. This is called an afterimage.

This phenomenon is caused by the sensitive photoreceptors (light receivers); primarily, the cone cells, in your eyes.

These cone cells adapt to the colors that they are being presented with (in this case, pink).

When the image is removed, the adapted cells receive less of those colors in the original image.

This makes them extra sensitive to the original image’s negative. For our pink heart experiment, the cones are extra sensitive to green.
SW-User
some disappeared and then reappeared... that's pretty cool.
sciguy18 · M
@SW-User Yes. If you take your eye off of the +, even for a second, the dots will reappear.

 
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