Helmholtz Illusion: Do Transverse Lines Make Us Look Overweight?

While personal tastes greatly affect our fashion world, we are careful not to make us look shorter or fatter than we are. Well indeed Do transverse lines make us look fatter than we are?

Rather than sticking to these generalizations that are floating around individual preferences in choosing clothes and it will always be more important to consider comfort. But if it puts your mind at ease, yes, this is just an illusion.

Scientist Hermann von Helmholtz made an interesting observation while examining the effects of lines on perception.

Before we all ponder Helmholtz’s claim, let’s filter it through thought. We thought that a square of the same size looks wider with horizontal lines and longer with vertical lines, right? Then you were initially eliminated. Because In Helmholtz’s research, the opposite was observed. This is today “Helmholtz Illusion” It was called.

According to Helmholtz Horizontal lines filling a square made the square appear longer. However, Helmholtz did not test this experiment on real people. So what do you think happened after this research?

It turned out that the square with horizontal stripes was perceived as 14% longer than its actual size, while the square with vertical stripes was perceived as 4.06% wider than its actual size!

It was planned to conduct a series of studies on this subject in the following stages. However, unfortunately, there is no consensus among scientists at this point. in 2009 British psychologists Peter Thompson and Kyriaki Mikellidouconducted a study on the subject using three-dimensional female models.

In this study, participants They compared 200 photographs of women wearing horizontal and vertical striped dresses. and they noted which woman looked fatter. The result of the research that wanted to test whether the illusion we mentioned was real or just an illusion was very surprising. Because it was determined that among two women of the same size, the one wearing a horizontal striped dress looked slimmer.

In 2011, psychologists from the University of York investigated whether this illusion holds true in everything.

Researchers first examine the illusion tested it on a three-dimensional cylinder. When they realized that the findings were the same, they decided to try the experiment on clothes this time. Two lifeless mannequins were dressed in horizontal or vertical striped clothes. The results showed that in both cases, the area covered by vertical lines was perceived as larger than the areas covered by horizontal lines of the same size.

If you thought that the work on this issue was over, you were wrong. Because it was thought that there might be something wrong in this matter, another research was conducted. Researchers noticed a shortcoming in previous studies and This time they decided to mix things up a bit.

The models used in previous experiments were copies of each other, but the people were not identical.

Since previous experiments were conducted on people and mannequins with the same body, it was thought that it might be an illusion. That’s why in these experiments, thin, thin, tall, fat; that is, they used models with different body types. And here an interesting situation arose.

Slim models looked even slimmer in horizontal striped clothes, i.e. Helmholtz Illusion Thus it was confirmed. However, the same was not true for overweight models. In fact, the line type did not have much of an effect on overweight models.

So, when choosing clothes, you no longer have to worry that horizontal stripes will make you look overweight. conventional wisdom It doesn’t always give the right result!

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