Bayesian Predictive Processing accounts of human cognition (in which it’s sometimes quipped that “perception is controlled hallucination”) offer an explanation for this type of optical illusion, also known as the “hollow face illusion”. We have a strong prior belief that plates should be concave (and faces should be convex) because that’s how they’re encountered most of the time in the world, so your brain generates this percept from its own inner beliefs. But then when you’re explicitly instructed to “see” it a different way, you manually override this effect and then you struggle to see them the original way.
Bayesian Predictive Processing accounts of human cognition (in which it’s sometimes quipped that “perception is controlled hallucination”) offer an explanation for this type of optical illusion, also known as the “hollow face illusion”. We have a strong prior belief that plates should be concave (and faces should be convex) because that’s how they’re encountered most of the time in the world, so your brain generates this percept from its own inner beliefs. But then when you’re explicitly instructed to “see” it a different way, you manually override this effect and then you struggle to see them the original way.