Vision scientists at UC Berkeley and MIT have discovered an upside to the brain mechanism that can blind us to subtle visual changes in the movies and in the real world.
Continuity bloopers happen in lots of movies, and we rarely catch them. Scientists explain why that’s a good thing
They’ve discovered a “continuity field” in which we visually merge together similar objects seen within a 15-second time frame, hence the previously mentioned jump from crewneck to henley goes largely unnoticed. Unlike in the movies, objects in the real world don’t spontaneously change from, say, a croissant to a pancake in a matter of seconds, so the continuity field is stabilizing what we see over time.
“The continuity field smoothes what would otherwise be a jittery perception of object features over time,” said David Whitney, associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and senior author of the study published March 30 in the journal, Nature Neuroscience.
“Essentially, it pulls together physically but not radically different objects to appear more similar to each other,” Whitney added. “This is surprising because it means the visual system sacrifices accuracy for the sake of the continuous, stable perception of objects.”
Conversely, without a continuity field, we may be hypersensitive to every visual fluctuation triggered by shadows, movement and myriad other factors. For example, faces and objects would appear to morph from moment to moment in an effect similar to being on hallucinogenic drugs, researchers said.
“The brain has learned that the real world usually doesn’t change suddenly, and it applies that knowledge to make our visual experience more consistent from one moment to the next,” said Jason Fischer, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and lead author of the study, which he conducted while he was a Ph.D. student in Whitney’s Lab at UC Berkeley.
Source https://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/03/30/continuityfield/
think about it! 