By staring only at center green dot, yellow dots will

Stare at the dot in the middle of the animation. Do you notice anything unusual?

Apart from possible nausea, the graphic will induce an unexpected phenomenon — blindness. But don't worry, it's just your mind playing tricks on you.

As you focus closely on that middle dot while the grid rotates, the three yellow dots on the outside will begin to disappear. If you shift your eyes away from the centre, the dots will all reappear.

The phenomenon is called 'motion-induced blindness,' and it is a trick of the eye that can cause a person to lose sight of stimuli that are in plain view.

Scroll down for video

MOTION-INDUCED BLINDNESS Motion-induced blindness causes a person to lose sight of objects that are in plain view. This optical phenomenon may be a way of separating unchanging background stimuli from 'artifacts of damage.' In the animation, the yellow dots will disappear to the viewer as he or she focuses on the center dot. Any movement of the eye, however, will bring all dots back into sight. Researchers have written that motion-induced blindness is not a failure to cope with visual input, but instead is a functional response, acting as 'logic of perception.' By this definition, this phenomenon is not actually blindness. Instead, the mind knowingly eliminates certain objects from view. Advertisement

The dots never actually disappear, your mind just perceives it that way.

While it may seem that this temporary blindness is a failure of the visual processing system, a 2007 study from Yale University suggests that motion-induced blindness may be a way of separating unchanging background stimuli from 'artifacts of damage.'

The Yale researchers, Joshua J. New and Brian J. Scholl, write that motion-induced blindness is not a failure to cope with visual input, but instead is a functional response, acting as 'logic of perception.'

By this definition, this phenomenon is not actually blindness. Instead, the mind knowingly eliminates certain objects from view.

'In motion-induced blindness (MIB), a target stimulus may disappear and reappear from conscious awareness when it is presented along with a global motion pattern,' the paper says.

As you focus on that middle dot while the grid rotates, the three yellow dots on the outside will begin to disappear. If you shift your eyes away from the centre, the dots will all reappear. The phenomenon is called 'motion-induced blindness,' and it is a trick of the eye that can cause a person to lose sight of stimuli that are in plain view

'This disappearance can occur repeatedly, for surprisingly salient objects, and even when observers are fully knowledgeable about the relevant manipulations.'

The researchers refer to this disappearance as perceptual-scotoma, or a partial loss of vision due to perception.

'MIB in this view, is an adaptive result of an unconscious inference about the likelihood of a bit of visual input being in the world,' the paper says.

'In this way, the perceptual-scotoma framework accounts for MIB via the same type of unconscious inferential process that has been appealed to in order to explain many other forms of visual processing.'

Previous research points to four approaches to address motion-induced blindness: attentional competition, interhemispheric rivalry, boundary adaptation, and surface completion.

In these approaches, MIB is addressed as a failure of visual processing, due to overloaded attention or sensory overstimulation. This, the researchers write, is more explicative of how MIB works, not why.