I don't think it is subconscious. In the bottom left of the vase picture, the "cat-like" version has "whiskers". The egg has a sort of caty blob on the right (though it's hard for me to decide whether the cat or truck version is more pronounced). The street picture has a white blob in the center that's "sheepier" than the chair version.

To me it seems like a conscious "if I had to pick the more cat-like one, this picture has a bit right here that sort of looks cat-like".

i.e. it's weird to say the images "influence" us. It seems more accurate to say that when prompted, we can perceive/understand what is confusing the model.

In the case of giving people to look at subtly-distorted images and asking them "truck-vs-cat" and "chair-vs-sheep", I think it's likely people thought: "Huh, I guess one of those involves artificially constructed angles and the other tends to organic rounded bits, so I'll decide on which seems extra-present."

To me that seems a reasonable--and not very exciting--explanation for why humans may get similar this-or-that answers to a machine-vision model.

Yeah but that's not what happened