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Memories of visual images (e.g., dinner plates) are stored in what is called visual memory.

Our minds use visual memory to perform even the simplest of computations; from remembering the face of someone we’ve just met, to remembering what time it was last we checked. Without visual memory, we wouldn’t be able to store—and later retrieve—anything we see.

ust as a computer’s memory capacity constrains its abilities, visual memory capacity has been correlated with a number of higher cognitive abilities, including academic success, fluid intelligence (the ability to solve novel problems), and general comprehension.

they remind us of the discrepancy between perception and reality. But our knowledge of such illusions has been largely limited to studying humans.

Understanding whether these illusions arise in different brains could help us understand how evolution shapes visual perception.

illusions not only reveal how visual scenes are interpreted and mentally reconstructed, they also highlight constraints in our perception.

task that took you a couple seconds to complete is a task that computers -- despite decades of advancement and intricate calculations -- still can't perform as efficiently as humans: the visual search.

"Our daily lives are comprised of little searches that are constantly changing, depending on what we need to do," said Miguel Eckstein, UC Santa Barbara professor of psychological and brain sciences. "So the idea is, where does that take place in the brain?"

What Eckstein and co-authors wanted to determine was how we decide whether the target object we are looking for is actually in the scene, how difficult the search is, and how we know we've found what we wanted.

The visual system optimally maintains attention on relevant objects even as eye movements are made, shows a study by the German Primate Center.

Their study shows that the rhesus macaque's brain quickly and efficiently shifts attention with each eye-movement in a well-synchronized manner. Since humans and monkeys exhibit very similar eye-movements and visual function, these findings are likely to generalize to the human brain. These results may help understand disorders like schizophrenia, visual neglect and other attention deficit disorders.

Since different locations on the retina stimulate different visual neurons in the brain, this means that one set of visual neurons responds to the child before the eye-movement, while a different second set of neurons responds to the child after the eye-movement. Thus, to optimally maintain attention on the child, the brain has to enhance the responses of the first set of neurons right until the eye-movement begins and then switch to enhance the responses of the second set of neurons right around when the eye-movement ends.

Emoji are now used in around half of every sentence on sites like Instagram, and Facebook looks set to introduce them alongside the famous “like” button as a way of expression your reaction to a post.

If you were to believe the headlines, this is just the tipping point: some outlets have claimed that emoji are an emerging language that could soon compete with English in global usage. To many, this would be an exciting evolution of the way we communicate; to others, it is linguistic Armageddon.

Do emoji show the same characteristics of other communicative systems and actual languages? And what do they help us to express that words alone can’t say?When emoji appear with text, they often supplement or enhance the writing. This is similar to gestures that appear along with speech. Over the past three decades, research has shown that our hands provide important information that often transcends and clarifies the message in speech. Emoji serve this function too – for instance, adding a kissy or winking face can disambiguate whether a statement is flirtatiously teasing or just plain mean.

What feels like up may actually be some other direction depending on how our brains process our orientation, according to psychology researchers at York University's Faculty of Health.

What feels like up may actually be some other direction depending on how our brains process our orientation, according to psychology researchers at York University's Faculty of Health.

an individual's interpretation of the direction of gravity can be altered by how their brain responds to visual information.

Why Do We Teach Girls That It’s Cute to Be Scared?

Apparently, fear is expected of women.

parents cautioned their daughters about the dangers of the fire pole significantly more than they did their sons and were much more likely to assist them

visualizing a successful outcome, under certain conditions, can make people less likely to achieve it. She rendered her experimental participants dehydrated, then asked some of them to picture a refreshing glass of water. The water-visualizers experienced a marked decline in energy levels, compared with those participants who engaged in negative or neutral fantasies. Imagining their goal seemed to deprive the water-visualizers of their get-up-and-go, as if they’d already achieved their objective.

take affirmations, those cheery slogans intended to lift the user’s mood by repeating them: “I am a lovable person!” “My life is filled with joy!” Psychologists at the University of Waterloo concluded that such statements make people with low self-esteem feel worse

Ancient philosophers and spiritual teachers understood the need to balance the positive with the negative, optimism with pessimism, a striving for success and security with an openness to failure and uncertainty

primates have a remarkable ability to detect snakes, even in a chaotic visual environment.

first evidence of snake-selective neurons in the primate brain that I’m aware of,

recorded pulvinar neuronal activity via electrodes implanted into the brains of two adult macaques—one male, one female—as they were shown images of monkey faces, monkey hands, geometric shapes, and snakes. The brains of both monkeys—which were raised at a national monkey farm in Amami Island, Japan, and had no known encounters with snakes before the experiment—showed preferential activity of neurons in the medial and dorsolateral pulvinar to images of snakes, as compared with the other stimuli. Further, snakes elicited the fastest and strongest responses from these neurons.

Facebook’s new plan to host news publications’ stories directly is not only about page views, advertising revenue or the number of seconds it takes for an article to load. It is about who owns the relationship with readers.

It’s why Google, a search engine, started a social network and why Facebook, a social network, started a search engine. It’s why Amazon, a shopping site, made a phone and why Apple, a phone maker, got into shopping.

Facebook’s experiment, called instant articles, is small to start — just a few articles from nine media companies, including The New York Times. But it signals a major shift in the relationship between publications and their readers. If you want to read the news, Facebook is saying, come to Facebook, not to NBC News or The Atlantic or The Times — and when you come, don’t leave. (For now, these articles can be viewed on an iPhone running the Facebook app.)

Expert judges and amateurs alike claim to judge classical musicians based on sound. But Tsay’s research suggests that the original judges, despite their experience and expertise, judged the competition (which they heard and watched live) based on visual information, just as amateurs do.

just like with classical music, we do not appraise wine in the way that we expect. 

Priceonomics revisited this seemingly damning research: the lack of correlation between wine enjoyment and price in blind tastings, the oenology students tricked by red food dye into describing a white wine like a red, a distribution of medals at tastings equivalent to what one would expect from pure chance, the grand crus described like cheap wines and vice-versa when the bottles are switched.

Our standard framework for thinking about engineering failures—reflected, for instance, in regulations for medical devices—was developed shortly after World War II, before the advent of software, for electromechanical systems. The idea was that you make something reliable by making its parts reliable (say, you build your engine to withstand 40,000 takeoff-and-landing cycles) and by planning for the breakdown of those parts (you have two engines). But software doesn’t break. Intrado’s faulty threshold is not like the faulty rivet that leads to the crash of an airliner. The software did exactly what it was told to do. In fact it did it perfectly. The reason it failed is that it was told to do the wrong thing.

Software failures are failures of understanding, and of imagination. Intrado actually had a backup router, which, had it been switched to automatically, would have restored 911 service almost immediately. But, as described in a report to the FCC, “the situation occurred at a point in the application logic that was not designed to perform any automated corrective actions.”

The introduction of programming languages like Fortran and C, which resemble English, and tools, known as “integrated development environments,” or IDEs, that help correct simple mistakes (like Microsoft Word’s grammar checker but for code), obscured, though did little to actually change, this basic alienation—the fact that the programmer didn’t work on a problem directly, but rather spent their days writing out instructions for a machine.

Exercise May Aid Brain's 'Rewiring'

Moderate levels of exercise may increase the brain’s flexibility and improve learning

The visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information, loses the ability to “rewire” itself with age,

It is a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is a figment of our imagination. Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world.

In other words, the real and the imagined share a physical source in the brain. So take a lesson from Socrates: “All I know is that I know nothing.”

One of the most important tools used by neuroscientists to understand how the brain creates its sense of reality is the visual illusion. Historically, artists as well as researchers have used illusions to gain insights into the inner workings of the visual system.

Judith, "barely clothed and fresh from the seduction and slaying of Holofernes, glows in her voluptuousness. Her hair is a dark sky between the golden branches of Assyrian trees, fertility symbols that represent her eroticism. This young, ecstatic, extravagantly made-up woman confronts the viewer through half-closed eyes in what appears to be a reverie of orgasmic rapture," writes Eric Kandel in his new book, The Age of Insight. Wait a minute. Writes who? Eric Kandel, the Nobel-winning neuroscientist who's spent most of his career fixated on the generously sized neurons of sea snails

Kandel goes on to speculate, in a bravura paragraph a few hundred pages later, on the exact neurochemical cognitive circuitry of the painting's viewer:

"At a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. The latent violence of Holofernes's decapitated head, as well as Judith's own sadistic gaze and upturned lip, could cause the release of norepinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure and triggering the fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the soft brushwork and repetitive, almost meditative, patterning may stimulate the release of serotonin. As the beholder takes in the image and its multifaceted emotional content, the release of acetylcholine to the hippocampus contributes to the storing of the image in the viewer's memory. What ultimately makes an image like Klimt's 'Judith' so irresistible and dynamic is its complexity, the way it activates a number of distinct and often conflicting emotional signals in the brain and combines them to produce a staggeringly complex and fascinating swirl of emotions."

these findings suggest that the neurophysiological mechanisms that we employ while dreaming (and recalling dreams) are the same as when we construct and retrieve memories while we are awake.

the researchers found that vivid, bizarre and emotionally intense dreams (the dreams that people usually remember) are linked to parts of the amygdala and hippocampus. While the amygdala plays a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions, the hippocampus has been implicated in important memory functions, such as the consolidation of information from short-term to long-term memory.

it was not until a few years ago that a patient reported to have lost her ability to dream while having virtually no other permanent neurological symptoms. The patient suffered a lesion in a part of the brain known as the right inferior lingual gyrus (located in the visual cortex). Thus, we know that dreams are generated in, or transmitted through this particular area of the brain, which is associated with visual processing, emotion and visual memories.

Much of the early research on motion perception was performed on insects,1 but similar results have been found for a huge range of species, from fishes to birds to mammals

Correspondingly, prey animals would find color vision of little use, but they are extremely good at seeing the motion of an approaching predator.

Ambiguous illusions that can be interpreted in two different ways, but not both ways at the same time, can also shed light on how we perceive the world around us

Language helps the human brain perceive obscured objects,

While some scientists have argued that vision is independent from outside factors, such as sounds or the brain’s accumulated knowledge, the study indicates that language influences perception at its most basic level.

“I think [the study] makes a really important contribution to the field of visual perception and cognition in general,” said Michael Spivey,

You don’t need a degree in semiotics to read meaning into an eggplant balanced on a ruler or peach with an old-fashioned telephone receiver on top. That the former is the universally recognized internet symbol for a large male member and the latter visual shorthand for a booty call is something most any 16-year-old could all too readily explain.

And so, starting this week, Grindr will offer to users a set of trademarked emoji, called Gaymoji — 500 icons that function as visual shorthand for terms and acts and states of being that seem funnier, breezier and less freighted with complication when rendered in cartoon form in place of words.

That is, toward a visual language of rainbow unicorns, bears, otters and handcuffs — to cite some of the images available in the first set of 100 free Gaymoji symbols.

Confirmation bias is a ubiquitous phenomenon, the effects of which have been traced as far back as Pythagoras’ studies of harmonic relationships in the 6th century B.C. (Nickerson, 1998), and is referenced in the writings of William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon (Risinger, Saks, Thompson, & Rosenthal, 2002). It is also a problematic phenomenon, having been implicated in “a significant fraction of the disputes, altercations, and misunderstandings that occur among individuals, groups, and nations” throughout human history, including the witch trials of Western Europe and New England, and the perpetuation of inaccurate medical diagnoses, ineffective medical treatments, and erroneous scientific theories (Nickerson, 1998, p. 175).

For over a century, psychologists have observed that people naturally favor information that is consistent with their beliefs or desires, and ignore or discount evidence to the contrary. In an article titled “The Mind’s Eye,” Jastrow (1899) was among the first to explain how the mind plays an active role in information processing, such that two individuals with different mindsets might interpret the same information in entirely different ways (see also Boring, 1930). Since then, a wealth of empirical research has demonstrated that confirmation bias affects how we perceive visual stimuli (e.g., Bruner & Potter, 1964; Leeper, 1935), how we gather and evaluate evidence (e.g., Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979; Wason, 1960), and how we judge—and behave toward—other people (e.g., Asch, 1946; Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1966; Snyder & Swann, 1978).