The ease with which you can flip between the two images is a marker of your creativity

The optical illusion is an image of a duck... or is it a rabbit?

Made famous by an American psychologist it tricks the mind


Rabbit or duck, or duck or rabbit - or neither of the two - what do you see?

That's the question taking social media by storm as debate rages about what the image really is - despite it being drawn more than 100 years ago.

The image is an illusion which can tell a lot about how a person's brain works.

How fast you can pick the animals in this image says a lot about how your brain works

Depending on whether an observer sees a duck or a rabbit first and how fast it sees the other is an indicator of how creative you are, and how fast your brain works.

Although it first appeared in a German magazine about 1892, it was later made famous by U.S. psychologist Joseph Jastrow in 1899.

Jastrow used the illusion to make the point that we 'see' with our brains as well as our eyes.

The research suggested that more creative people were able to switch between images of the two animals more quickly than other people.

Participants who found it very easy to flip between rabbit and duck came up with an average of almost five novel uses for an everyday item. Those who couldn’t flip between rabbit and duck at all came up with less than two novel uses.

This suggests that the ease with which you can flip representations is a clue to how creative you are. The moment when you flip between duck and rabbit is like a small flash of creative insight. It’s when you notice the world can be seen in a different way.

Highly creative people often display this talent for finding new uses for an existing object or by making connections between two previously unconnected ideas or things.

When testing children at different times of the year, the results change.

During Easter, they are more likely to see a rabbit first. In October, seeing a duck first is more common.

But for social media users, reactions range from surprise, amazement and frustration, to ridicule of the image, with posts of the illusion by popular pages attracting hundreds of comments and thousands of 'likes'.

So what do you see?