One hundred years of an ambiguous figure: Happy birthday, duck/rabbit!

In the present study, Jastrow's famous ambiguous drawing of a duck/ rabbit was presented to 100 students along with 11 published variants from later r esearch. The beak/ears of the animal pointed to the right for half of the s ubjects and to the left for the other half. For each figure subjects were r equired to rate the ease of bird and of rabbit identification on a 9-point scale. Raw data of subjects' ratings are presented for the convenience of e xperimenters planning research with a specific bird/rabbit figure. Of the 1 2 figures, 6 were significantly bird-dominant, 2 were rabbit dominant, and only 4 figures mere truly ambiguous, i.e., a bird was as easily identified as was a rabbit. With the exception of one figure (the whole-body represent ation of a duck/rabbit), bird and rabbit ratings were not affected by the o rientation of the beak/ears. Jastrow's original drawing was the seventh out of the 12 figures in rated ambiguity, suggesting a secure place for it in research on visual ambiguity.