Vision

Who says politics and science can't mix?   Well, we say they shouldn't mix but we're rare in science media.  Yet sometimes political events can make for great science studies too. Case in point, the value neuroscientists at the University of Washington got when former President George W. Bush and Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had shoes thrown at them by a crazy Iraqi 'reporter' during a Baghdad news conference.  When Bush ducked and Maliki didn't flinch as the first shoe sailed toward them, it was a real-world example supporting the theory that there are two independent…

Seeing the world through 'rose-colored glasses'  may be more biological reality than metaphor, according to a University of Toronto study that provides the first direct evidence that our mood literally changes the way our visual system filters our perceptual experience. The U of T team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine how our visual cortex processes sensory information when in good, bad, and neutral moods. They found that donning the rose-coloured glasses of a good mood is less about the colour and more about the expansiveness of the view.  "Good and bad moods…

Erik Weihenmayer wears sunglasses often. He was wearing them to protect his eyes when he reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in 1997. He had them on when he completed the 2003 Primal Quest, the world's toughest multi-sport adventure race. And, he put on a pair during a recent visit to the National Eye Institute (NEI). But this last set is no ordinary pair of Oakley sunglasses.  Weihenmayer looks through them, peering down at a white note card on a table. He silently moves his head back and forth, up and down. After a few moments, he says, "Is that a 12?" Richard Hogle, sitting next…

Facial recognition is not as automatic as it may seem, according to researchers who have identified specific areas in the brain devoted solely to picking out faces among other objects we encounter. Two specific effects have been established as being critical for facial recognition – holistic processing (in which we view the face as a whole, instead of in various parts) and left-side bias (in which we have a preference for the left side of the face). Psychologists Janet H. Hsiao from the University of Hong Kong and Garrison W. Cottrell from the University of California, San Diego wanted to…

What's different about nocturnal mammals that have 'night vision'?  According to a Cell report, the DNA within the photoreceptor rod cells responsible for low light vision is packaged in a very unconventional way.   That special DNA architecture turns the rod cell nuclei themselves into tiny light-collecting lenses, with millions of them in every nocturnal eye. In non-dividing cells, DNA is associated with proteins to form the so-called chromatin, with more condensed "heterochromatin" at the periphery and less condensed "euchromatin" in the interior. Although cell type-specific…

Video may have killed the radio star(*) but violent video games may save the vision of teens who play them, according to a new Tel Aviv University study. Dr. Uri Polat of Tel Aviv University's Goldschlager Eye Institute and his collaborators compared the effects of playing violent action games like "Unreal Tournament 2004" and "Call of Duty 2" to other video games which do not require high levels of visual-motor coordination, like "The Sims." Administering a standardized visual test to 22 game-playing teenagers, Polat assessed the teens' Contrast Sensitivity Function (CSF), the primary factor…

We all know that people sometimes change their behavior when someone is looking their way.   A new study in Current Biology shows that jackdaws, birds related to crows and ravens with eyes that appear similar to human eyes, can do the same.  "Jackdaws seem to recognize the eye's role in visual perception, or at the very least they are extremely sensitive to the way that human eyes are oriented," said Auguste von Bayern, formerly of the University of Cambridge and now at the University of Oxford.  When presented with a preferred food, hand-raised jackdaws took significantly…

Here's another reason why dieters should avoid all-you-can-eat buffets: When faced with a large variety of items, consumers tend to underestimate how much of each item is present, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Authors Joseph P. Redden (University of Minnesota) and Stephen J. Hoch (University of Pennsylvania) investigated consumers' perceptions of quantity in a set of experiments that may help us understand how quantity perceptions influence portion sizes. "Does a bowl with both red and blue candies seem to have more or less than a bowl with only one color candy…

Video games that involve high levels of action,like first-person-shooter games, can increase real-world vision, according to research in Nature Neuroscience, including discerning slight differences in shades of gray; an attribute of the human visual system that can't be improved, it has been believed. Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, says that very practiced action gamers can actually become 58 percent better at perceiving fine differences in contrast. The finding builds on Bavelier's past work that has shown that action video…

In this study, I will propose, that the relationship between Mind and Vision can enable us to draw certain conclusions relevant to one aspect of what constitutes the Mind, and therefrom, we may seek a better understanding of what the 'I', or the 'Self' is. In seeking such an understanding, I have sought to increase our understanding of the issues we shall discuss, by employing novel mathematical and logic symbols. This will be of fundamental importance to my thesis, not only because I am using novel notations and symbols, but because the latter will enable us to clarify and speed up our…