An optical illusion from 2000 by Jacques Ninio has recently gone viral after being posted to Facebook yesterday by psychology professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka.

Entitled Ninio’s Extinction Illusion, there are 12 black dots at the intersections of this image but most people can’t see them all due to our poor periphery vision. Ninio explains:

 

“When the white disks in a scintillating grid are reduced in size, and outlined in black, they tend to disappear. One sees only a few of them at a time, in clusters which move erratically on the page. Where they are not seen, the grey alleys seem to be continuous, generating grey crossings that are not actually present. Some black sparkling can be seen at those crossings where no disk is seen. The illusion also works in reverse contrast.” [source]