SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Humans treat 'inferred' visual objects generated by the brain as more reliable than external images from the real world, according to new research published in eLife.
The study, from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, reveals that when choosing between two identical visual objects -- one generated internally based on information from the blind spot and an external one -- we are surprisingly likely to show a bias towards the internal information.
To make sense of the world, humans and animals need to combine information from multiple sources. This is usually done according to how reliable each piece of information is. For example, to know when to cross the street, we usually rely more on what we see than what we hear -- but this can change on a foggy day.
"In such situations with the blind spot, the brain 'fills in' the missing information from its surroundings, resulting in no apparent difference in what we see," says senior author Professor Peter König, from the University of Osnabrück's Institute of Cognitive Science. "While this fill-in is normally accurate enough, it is mostly unreliable because no actual information from the real world ever reaches the brain. We wanted to find out if we typically handle this filled-in information differently to real, direct sensory information, or whether we treat it as equal."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18 2017, @12:49PM
Not mentioned in tfs is a basic difference in the way that data can be "made up": Interpolation means filling in points where there is data all around the area where the made-up data is created. In the case of physical experiments this is normally "safe" as long as the spacing between data points is not too far and the process being measured is relatively linear. In the case of the blind spot in the eye, it usually works OK, but there are well known experiments that show how to hide something (nonlinear visual field) briefly in the blind spot.
Extrapolation is generally more "risky" (less likely to be true) when extending existing data beyond the range of the measured or known data. Continuing the example for the eye, this would be like inventing a scene behind your head where the eye has no data.