The mind’s eye scans like a spotlight

You’re meeting a friend in a crowded cafeteria. Do your eyes scan the room like a roving spotlight, moving from face to face, or do you take in the whole scene, hoping that your friend’s face will pop out at you? And what, for that matter, determines how fast you can scan the room?

Researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory say you are more likely to scan the room, jumping from face to face as you search for your friend. In addition, the timing of these jumps appears to be determined by waves of activity in the brain that act as a clock. The study, which appears in the Aug. 13 issue of the journal Neuron, sheds new light on a long-standing debate among neuroscientists over how the visual system picks out an object of interest in a complex scene.

By Deborah Halber (MIT News)

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Culture influences brain function, study shows

People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging study of its kind.

Psychological research has established that American culture, which values the individual, emphasizes the independence of objects from their contexts, while East Asian societies emphasize the collective and the contextual interdependence of objects. Behavioral studies have shown that these cultural differences can influence memory and even perception. But are they reflected in brain activity patterns?

By Cathryn M. Delude (MIT News)

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The Time Emotion Paradox

Time flies when you’re having fun, but why? It’s curious if you think about it. Someone whose visual perception was affected by enjoyment would seem rather unusual but the fact that our ability to judge time changes dramatically when we enjoy ourselves seems perfectly unremarkable.

A recent article in the scientific journal Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society attempts to answer exactly this question by reviewing the evidence for the curious link between emotion and time perception.

“One of the greatest paradoxes in the field of time psychology is the time–emotion paradox. Over the last few decades, an increasing volume of data has been identified demonstrating the accuracy with which humans are able to estimate time. Confronted with this amazing ability, psychologists have supposed that humans, as other animals, possess a specific mechanism that allows them to measure time…”

By Mind Hacks

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Also follow the article: The Time Emotion Paradox By Silvie Droit-Volet and Sandrine Gil. (Scribd)

The present manuscript discusses the time–emotion paradox in time psychology: although humans are able to accurately estimate time as if they possess a specific mechanism that allows them to measure time (i.e. an internal clock), their representations of time are easily distorted by the context.  Indeed, our sense of time depends on intrinsic context, such as the emotional state, and on extrinsic context, such as the rhythm of others’ activity. Existing studies on the relationships between emotion and time suggest that these contextual variations in subjective time do not result from the incorrect functioning of the internal clock but rather from the excellent ability of the internal clock to adapt to events in one’s environment. Finally, the fact that we live and move in time and that everything, every act, takes more or less time has often been neglected. Thus, there is no unique, homogeneous time but instead multiple experiences of time. Our subjective temporal distortions directly reflect the way our brain and body adapt to these multiple time scales.

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In the Mind’s Eye: How the Brain Makes a Whole Out of Parts

When a human looks at a number, letter or other shape, neurons in various areas of the brain’s visual center respond to different components of that shape, almost instantaneously fitting them together like a puzzle to create an image that the individual then “sees” and understands, researchers at The Johns Hopkins University report.

Ed Connor, Ph. D. (The Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute)

By Newswise

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Hole in the Head: Golf and Perception

Psychologists have found that golfers who’ve played well perceive the hole as bigger than it really is. As this ScienCentral video explains, the researchers also found those who did poorly saw the hole as smaller than it really is.

By Jack Penland (Sciencentral)

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All in the mind’s eye

Has anyone ever let their imagination run away with them? For example, we recently had a problem with moths in our house, and for a while afterwards, I was convinced I could see moths everywhere. Luckily, I’m not going mad, as researchers from Vanderbilt University in the US have now proved that what you see with your ‘mind’s eye’ might have a direct impact on what you see back in reality. This is the first study to show that imagining something changes your vision both while you are imagining it and afterwards.

By The Naked Scientists

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‘Mind’s eye’ influences visual perception

Letting your imagination run away with you may actually influence how you see the world. New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery –what we see with the “mind’s eye”– directly impacts our visual perception.

The School for Self Healing

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