A woman who was left baffled by a seemingly impossible "spot the difference" picture puzzle may have finally got the answers she sought.
Puzzles can be a source of frustration, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. In 2023, a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition found that people who were angry performed better than those who were neutral when it came to facing a challenging puzzle.
That didn't necessarily prove the case for Katlyn Gibson, a woman from Alberta, Canada, who took to Reddit recently after admitting she had been struggling to finish a "spot the difference" puzzle since Thanksgiving.
Gibson's puzzling problem started in her place of work.
"I help young people, mostly between ages of 9 and 16, in a short-term program to help them get stable and get the support they need to integrate into a family setting (i.e. foster care) or continue with group care (i.e. a group home)," Gibson told Newsweek.
"We really just focus on giving the kids stability, routine, and lots of love. It's a tough job, because I also deal with some of the most underprivileged youth who have been abandoned by loved ones for most, if not all, of their lives, so they are often in need of a lot of care and love."
As part of the role, she gets the kids engaged in a variety of activities such as bowling, swimming and laser tag. More recently, she organized a huge Thanksgiving turkey dinner. That's where she first came across the "spot the difference" puzzle.
"We got these large packages of placemats from the dollar store for Thanksgiving," she said. "As we were finishing, everyone was trying to 'spot the difference' if they had the same placemat, and out of about five people, no one could figure it out."
Gibson ended up taking one of the mat's home, where the puzzle continued to confound. "It ended up starting a huge debate, mostly between myself and my fiancé, but eventually all of our friends joined in and no one could spot the differences properly," she said.
Eventually, she decided to share a picture of the "ridiculous" puzzle to Reddit under the handle u/TheRudeCactus. The post ended up garnering over 13,000 upvotes and, eventually, an answer to what the fifth and final difference between the two images of the turkeys was.
One user identified the differences best and most succinctly when they wrote: "Cheeks, top knot, feathers, lines on chest and size."
It turns out one of the turkeys was ever so slightly larger than the other, which was the one difference Gibson had failed to spot. She was very much appreciative of the difference being highlighted though, responding to one post saying: "Thank you. You have really brought peace into our lives with this development."
Gibson said that even now she still gets people pointing out that the size is the fifth different. "As soon as someone pointed it out, everyone was relieved and also felt a little stupid," she said. "We really couldn't figure it out."
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