Once you press Start, try your best to find a triangle! The whole shape can be a triangle but also the small elements forming the whole shape can be triangles. Please press right arrow →, if a triangle is present and left arrow ← if it is absent. Try to be as fast and as accurate as you can!

What just happened?

If you look at your responses, you can see that you reacted faster (and also more accurately) when the whole shape was a triangle than if the small elements forming the big shape were triangles. In other words, you see the forest rather than trees.

Many researchers could show the exactly same phenomena and concluded, that we probably have a preference of processing the whole shape instead of processing the small elements, i.e. we direct our attention first on the whole shape. It seems to be difficult for us to overcome our dominant strategy of attending the whole shape. Therefore, we are typically slower and make more mistakes when we have to find the triangle within the small elements forming the whole shape. Interestingly, baboons are much better at finding a local shape and chimpanzees are equally good at both tasks.