SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Exposure to a common visual illusion may enhance your ability to read fine print, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
"We discovered that visual acuity -- the ability to see fine detail -- can be enhanced by an illusion known as the 'expanding motion aftereffect' -- while under its spell, viewers can read letters that are too small for them to read normally," says psychological scientist Martin Lages of the University of Glasgow.
Visual acuity is normally thought to be dictated by the shape and condition of the eye but these new findings suggest that it may also be influenced by perceptual processes in the brain.
Interest in the intersection between perception and reality led Lages and co-authors Stephanie C. Boyle (University of Glasgow) and Rob Jenkins (University of York) to wonder about visual illusions and how they might affect visual acuity.
"The expanding motion aftereffect can make objects appear larger than they really are and our question was whether this apparent increase in size could bring about the visual benefits associated with actual increases in size," Boyle explains. "In particular, could it make small letters easier to read?"
Journal Reference: Martin Lages, Stephanie C. Boyle, Rob Jenkins. Illusory Increases in Font Size Improve Letter Recognition. Psychological Science, 2017; 095679761770539 DOI: 10.1177/0956797617705391
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by tfried on Thursday July 13 2017, @07:34PM (1 child)
Which does not actually contradict the idea that "visual acuity is influenced by [...] the brain", at all. But if we both stop the smart-assing, I think we'll be able to agree that this is a cool finding underlining the very fact that the human eye is not merely some kind of photo-plate.
One of the cooler aspects of this experiment is that it could literally have been thought up decades (centuries?) ago, as the expanding motion aftereffect is totally an old hat. But nobody did before, as, apparently, nobody thought of this effect as anything more than a plain illusion. It will be interesting to see some theories on where in the brain this effect actually arises. Yes, the retina itself has three(?) layers of neurons itself, for contrast enhancement and edge detection. But I am not aware of any theory accounting for motion aftereffects in those "low-level hardware" layers.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday July 15 2017, @05:14PM
I don't get migraine headaches, but once or twice a year I get optical migraine [pinimg.com]. Scared the hell out of me the first time it happened, so I rushed to the eye doctor. He said that they're not caused by the eye itself, but are 100% from the brain's visual cortex and it was nothing to worry about.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org