According to research commissioned and published by Ford Europe, drivers who also ride a bicycle are more observant than those who don’t…

A study commissioned by FordDriving Skills for Life claims that car drivers who own a bicycle and regularly ride on the road are more observant and quicker to react to road situations than drivers who don’t ride a bicycle.

One of the images shown to the 2000 people contacted is above (and we’ll explain what you should have noticed later). The research of people living in France, Spain, Germany, Italy and the UK included showing them identical images, like the one above, but with subtle differences with road signs, cars, bicycles and pedestrians present in one image, but not the other.

According to Ford, in each instance, drivers who cycled were quicker to point out the difference. “Drivers who cycle identified that there had been a change to the image in less than ten seconds (9.25 seconds), whereas those drivers who did not cycle took on average more than a second longer (10.68 seconds). The first group were also 3 per cent more likely to correctly identify that there had been a change,” Ford said.

Let us put you out of your misery, in the image above you should have noticed the missing countdown timer in the image on the left.