Does Spinning dancer has anything to do with your eyesight

Question

I came across the spinning dancer as part of the brain test to determine left brain vs right brain dominance.

I saw the dancer is turning clockwise. The other people around me saw it turning clockwise for the first time, but soon they got confused and said they saw it turning it in both direction.

I know the tips of how to see it anti clockwise, but no matter what I do I always see it clockwise. I have shown it to a number of people and all of them could see it spinning in both direction after looking at it for longer time.

I am the only person who has never see the dancer turning in both direction.

My question is does this has anything to do with my eyesight? I have very limited(almost blind) eyesight in my left eyes. This is from birth.

Does my visual impairment has anything to do with this or does this mean anything else?

Answer 1

For a bit of background, this test was devised by Nobuyuki Kayahara and it was originally thought that it shows the dominance of one part of the brain to the other. This was later on discarded as a misconception (reference). It is now widely believed that the clockwise - counter-clockwise rotation is a phenomenon called Bistable perception (Reference 1 and reference 2).

Multistable perceptual phenomena are a form of perceptual phenomena in which there are unpredictable sequences of spontaneous subjective changes. While usually associated with visual perception, such phenomena can be found for auditory and olfactory percepts. Famous examples include the Necker cube, structure from motion, monocular rivalry and binocular rivalry, but many more visually ambiguous patterns are known. Since most of these images lead to an alternation between two mutually exclusive perceptual states, they are sometimes also referred to as bistable perception(reference 1 and reference 2).

No, the fact that you can only see her turn clockwise has not got anything to with your vision (for the record, I have never been able to see the girl go counter- clockwise myself).

Sometimes, a person will stare at an image and it will never reverse. Dr. Toppino advises staring at one part of the image, such as the foot, and most of the time it will eventually flip. In people who can’t see the reversal, it may be that one underlying neural structure is more dominant, but once someone finally manages to see the flip, it will start to happen more often (reference).

This image would help you watch her rotate counter-clockwise.

Here she is spinning clockwise.