I would also hardly count many of these questions as "tricks" either. Take the chess example. A lot of my friends and myself have been playing chess since we were young children and we all know that a fully populated chess board has 32 pieces (heavily weighted in our internal training data), but not a single one of us would have gotten that question wrong.
Imagine walking to a room an seeing someone grab a handful of chess pieces off of a set-up board, and proceed to fill bags with 4 pieces each. As they fill the 8th bag, they notice only 3 pieces are left. Are you confident that you would respond "I saw the board only had 31 pieces on it when you started", or might you reply "perhaos you dropped a piece on the floor"?
Nobody's arguing that humans never take logical shortcuts or that those shortcuts can cause us to make errors.
Some of the rebuttals in this thread are ridiculous. Like what if I forced you to stare at the surface of the sun followed by waterboarding for several hours, and then asked you to look at a 1000 different chess boards. Are you sure you wouldn't make a mistake?
In the paper the various VLLMs are asked to double-check which still didn't make a difference. The argument is more along the lines that VLLMs (and multimodal LLMs) aren't really thinking in the same way that humans do.
And if you REALLY need an example albeit a bit tangential - try this one out. Ask any SOTA (multimodal or otherwise) model such as gpt-image-1, Kontext, Imagen4, etc. for a five-leaf cover. It'll get it about 50% of the time.
Now go and ask any kindergartener for the same thing.
Ironically I think a lot of people in this thread are remembering things they learned about the faultiness of humans' visual memory and applying it to visual processing.
ChatGPT mentioned The Case Against Reality but I never read that, the idea was similar.