Can you believe what your eyes see?

A new report said, you can remember wrong when the eyes are constantly turning to identify the scene.

Whether we are drinking water in a certain context or not, our eyeballs are constantly reversing naturally to recognize the different characteristics of the scene. A previous study has determined that eyeballs look at a specific point within a third to a few seconds; between such views, the eyeball swung continuously for 50 milliseconds. During this change of attention, vision is reduced and a temporary array of blindness occurs.

So, with all this ' crazy ' movement (not to mention temporary blindness), how our brains can assemble all the characteristics of the scene into a complete picture , detailed and continuous?

The answer may be due to a wrinkle during image processing called ' boundary extension', and as a result, the brain visualizes the landscape not only with information. included, as an image, but also by what the brain extrapolates beyond the boundaries of the image.

'The world surrounds you but you only have two eyeballs right in front of you to capture the image of this world,' said Helene Intraub, a psychologist at the University of Delaware and co-author of a study. New research on visual processing process published in Neuron magazine, said.

Scientists believe that an error in the visual processing process can help the brain ' compensate ' for separate information received from eyeballs when they are constantly inverted. (Photo: Imaginginfo.com)

In 1989, Mrs. Intraub participated in a study that first described the characteristics of boundary expansion. At that time, she discovered that when people were shown a similar picture twice - a picture of a bicycle in front of a white fence - within a few milliseconds, these people would mistakenly the second photo is close-up of the bike and is not the same as the details of the previous photo they saw. Interestingly, if one is shown the same photo and then a wide-angle version of the picture - with the bike a little smaller (because the fence will be bigger in the picture. ) - they will be able to confuse the second photo like the original photo they saw. Mrs. Intraub said, fundamentally, it seems that 'the brain has mapped around the corners of the image,' and this may be the way to 'help the brain unify the times the eye stops point by point. continuously together. '

In this study, Ms. Intraub worked with psychologist Marvin Chun at Marvin's lab at Yale University to study, through fMRI functional magnetic resonance imaging, whether whether the behavior she observed actually took place in the brain. The team focused on two areas of the brain associated with specific landscape perception processes: the hippocampus (PPA), an area in the middle half of the brain between the two hemispheres of the brain and the cortical retrosplenia (RSC). The outermost layer of the brain . Eighteen test participants were shown two consecutive photos, such as a photo of a tap on a lawn, appearing in one of four ways: close-up, wide-screen, wide-angle, and then close-up, wide with wide or two images with close-up in horizontal rows.

In the RSC cortex, there is a ray of electrical activity when the first image is projected. An equivalent trigger is measured when the second image appears in the above way - except when the close-up image is projected after a wide-angle image. The decline of this activity when the photo has a wide angle is projected after a narrower picture, Mrs. Intraub said, 'showing that this brain region has taken place as I saw before.' In the PPA region of the brain, activity is reduced in all cases, except when the close-up image of a rear-facing image is wide. Intraub explained, this shows that the PPA has taken place in the process of widening boundaries and it also ' collects' the characteristics of the scene in the image. She said, 'in the PPA area, what we discovered is that if you give a close-up photo and then a close-up picture, it is still recognized by the brain - brain activity is less impaired. reduction.'

The researchers also examined an area called the occipital cortex, an area at the end of the brain that was object-oriented. In every test case, the activity of this part of the brain is impaired when the second picture is shown, that is, it only notices the presence of the tap water.

Intraub notes, while widening the boundary appears to be a coping mechanism in integrating information from images recorded by eyeballs, 'we cannot create any direct link, ' because these areas, ' not involved in eye movement. ' Instead, 'this part of the brain, as we thought, is telling us about the brain's visualization, the visualization that it' translates' from different images that eyeballs record . "

She added that more research is needed to use the fMRI technique to better define the exact role of the PPA and RSC regions in visual processing.

Thanh Van