I couldn't find anyone who studies the really specific cannot-unsee phenomenon that I'm talking about here. But Villanova psychologist Tom Toppino has been studying phenomena like this for decades. He sent me a famous image from the academic literature that gets at what's happening with the World Cup logo. I'm not going to tell you what it is yet, but there is a figure in this field of spots. (Don't scroll ahead!)

See it yet?

It's a dalmatian, camouflaged.

"It is hard to discern a Dalmatian standing among many black spots scattered on a white background because the part of the image corresponding to the dog lacks contours that define the edges of the dog, and the dog’s spotted texture resembles that of the background," write Dartmouth cognitive scientists Peter Tse and Howard Hughes. "Many observers find that they first recognize one part of the dog, say the head, which then makes the whole dog’s shape apparent."

Here, I'll outline it (just in case).

And if you ever encounter this image again, you will immediately see the dalmatian again. What's interesting is that the visual stimulus (the picture) doesn't change, but once your mind knows what kind of organization to impose, it's obvious that the dalmatian is there.

"When the scene is encountered again, sensory cues will again identify high information areas, but this time the prior knowledge needed to complete the perceptual act is readily available, and the perceptual interpretation is achieved in a way that seems automatic and perhaps inevitable," Toppino said. "One general lesson of this demonstration is that perception is not the result of simply processing stimulus cues. It also importantly involves fitting prior knowledge to the current situation to create a meaningful interpretation."

In short: what you know influences what you see.

One way psychologists and other people who study the brain have been probing these questions is through the use of ambiguous figures. These are images for which there are two totally plausible alternative interpretations. Here's a famous one that may give you nightmares:

What do you see? I see a duck first, then a rabbit. But in a test, more people saw the rabbit first. But it's the ability to flip back and forth that gets to me. Once I saw the rabbit, I couldn't unsee it, even if I could occasionally force my perception to see the duck.

Or try this one, perhaps the most famous ambiguous image of all.

Most people see a young woman, but some see an older woman. Others see both. For the life of me, I can't force my mind to find the older woman in the image.



Back in the 1960s, one scientist (Gerald Fisher) even showed how to develop this kind of figure using gradations of ambiguity.

Almost everyone sees a guy in the top left box and almost everyone sees a woman in the bottom right box, but the illustrations in the middle could go either way.



Other images are called "reversible." These are pictures that toggle between states. You see one thing, look away, then look back and see another. A lot of these fall into the optical illusion category, and psychologists like to manipulate the conditions under which one or the other will appear.