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ek slash special offer. This is Scientific American 60 second science I'm

Christopher and Tagyatta.

Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting also has an optical illusion named for it,

the Mona Lisa effect.

It's the feeling that the subject of a painting is following you with her gaze.

You continuously feel being looked at despite moving to the left or moving to the right,

perhaps even rotating the picture.

Sebastian Loth is a psychologist at the University of Beelifield in Germany, and while he doesn't dispute

that the illusion itself exists, you've probably also seen it in the Uncle Sam Army recruitment

poster, he says there's a problem with the phenomenon's name.

I can show you so many papers where people have literally started the introduction with,

we all know that Mona Lisa looks at you, and so on and so forth, and then it would

go into their argument, whatever it is, but actually she, the specific picture, doesn't look at you.

...