Lawnmower or Stroller

A few minutes ago, just as I was approaching the Viewpoint, I caught sight of a man mowing the lawn there. I saw him just out of the corner of my eye. After as split second, I realized it was a woman with a baby in stroller I was seeing--not a man waith a lawn mower. I parked on the neighboring street and got out of my car. I immediately heard the sound of an electric lawn mower and saw that there was, in fact, a man mowing the lawn. And suddenly I thought of the "rabbit or duck" toggle that was discussed in the course I once took on the psychology of visual art and then Gombrich's writings on how we see what we expect to see. Now, lawnmower or stroller isn't really quite analogous to rabbit or duck. Gombrich wrote about an artist who made a drawing of a building that had some architectural feature--a detail of the window frames or windows or something, I think--that was atypical of the style in which the building was designed. And this artist failed to notice the atypical element, instead rendering the building according to the cannons of that style, whatever it was. Isn't my perception of the man mowing the lawn more similar to Gombrich's anecdote than to the rabbit or duck perceptual toggle? But it was the rabbit or duck scenario I thought of first, once I'd realized my error in perception. Is that because the rabbit or duck image is "stickier"? As a meme, does it have greater fitness than Gombrich's artist who messed up on the building?

With all of that on my mind, I looked at the bay. There were still some nice colors down there, but, I tell you, fall is all over. It's downhill from here. We're headed straight for winter.