Vision

If you see a chicken, you know that's a chicken. If you see a cartoon of a chicken, you know that's a chicken. But can you draw a chicken from memory? Most people cannot draw anything that looks anything like a chicken, but is it because branding is not quality, our memories are poor, or we lose something between brains and fingers? What about something simpler and in the daily lives of Apple users more than chickens like the Apple logo? Can they draw it from memory? Probably not, as it turns out. A new study in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology found that out of 85 UCLA…

Is Myopia the new Rickets? A new study compares the history of school myopia with the bone disease rickets. During the 17th century, rickets was common among children in England and then reached epidemic levels through northern Europe and North America. In some cities, 80 percent of children were affected. The remedy proved elusive until the 1920s, when scientists discovered that a lack of sunlight, resulting in vitamin D deficiency, was the cause of rickets.  Over the last 30 years, short sight, or myopia, has become a global health problem. The most dramatic rise has been in…

Why did the earliest side-scrolling games go left to right? From the 1980s on, they seemed to do that. And in the western world people write left to right. That is enough for psychologist Dr. Peter Walker of Lancaster University to speculate that there may be a fundamental bias in the way people prefer to see moving items depicted in pictures.  Did video game developers in the early 1980s obey an evolutionary mandate in designing games? An analysis of thousands of items in Google Images led Walker to believe there is widespread evidence for such a left-to-right bias and…

The human eye is optimized to have good color vision at day and high sensitivity at night.  But until recently it seemed as if the cells in the retina were wired the wrong way round, with light traveling through a mass of neurons before it reaches the light-detecting rod and cone cells. New research presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society has uncovered a remarkable vision-enhancing function for this puzzling structure. About a century ago, the fine structure of the retina was discovered. The retina is the light-sensitive part of the eye, lining the inside of the eyeball…

We have two eyes and each differ in their optical properties - you can easily tell by placing a hand over each and seeing the difference. As a result of the fits and starts and do-overs in evolution that got us eyes, our vision system results in a blur projected in each retina and then the visual system calibrates itself to give us a clear picture. In the past, researchers had people where glasses where images were upside down. Eventually, our brains compensated and the images were correct - until people took off the glasses.  An international research at Consejo Superior de…

A dress that seems to be different colors to different people has all the Internet intrigued - and that's a good thing. It's a good way to understand science and psychology. There are two hypotheses as to why people see dramatically different things; one is that our brains are constantly being bombarded by information and so we end up making a lot of assumptions and interpretations based on parameters. If you are looking up close at something and infer a blue background, you see the dress differently than people who assume it has an artificial light background, like yellow. Then there is…

An estimated 285 million people are visually impaired worldwide and age-related macular degeneration alone is the leading cause of blindness among older adults. There may be some new hope, in the form of prototype telescopic contact lenses.  Eric Tremblay from EPFL in Switzerland says the first iteration of the telescopic contact lens--which magnifies 2.8 times--was announced in 2013. Since then the scientists behind the DARPA-funded project have been fine-tuning the lens membranes and developing accessories to make the eyewear smarter and more comfortable for longer periods of time…

Tony Angelotti stunt doubling Johnny Depp in the first ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movie. Image credit: Courtesy of Tony Angelotti By: Emilie Lorditch, Inside Science  (Inside Science) -- While watching an action scene in a movie, most viewers are so engrossed in what is happening on the screen that they don’t notice that the actor has been temporarily replaced by his or her stunt double. Our brains are master multitaskers that keep us alive and help us recognize danger and yet both of these brain responses can help film editors "fool" the brain into thinking what we are seeing is…

According to some papers, human echolocation is another "sense," working in tandem with hearing and touch to deliver information to people with visual impairment. A new paper adds evidence for the vision-like qualities of echolocation in blind echolocators - by wrongly judging how heavy objects of different sizes felt. The experiment, conducted by psychologist Gavin Buckingham of Heriot-Watt University in Scotland and colleagues at the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University in Canada, demonstrated that echolocators experience a "size-weight illusion" when they use their echolocation…

The evolution of trichromatic color vision in humans occurred by first switching from the ability to detect UV light to blue light between 80 and 30 million years ago and then by adding green-sensitivity(between 45-30 million years ago to the preexisting red-sensitivity in the vertebrate ancestor, according to Shozo Yokoyama et al. in PLOS Genetics. The molecular basis of functional differentiation is a fundamental question in biology. To fully appreciate how these changes are generated, it is necessary to evaluate the relationship between genes and functions. This is a difficult task because…