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posted by on Thursday May 18 2017, @05:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the illusions-michael dept.

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."


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by ledow on Thursday May 18 2017, @07:21AM (6 children)

    by ledow (5567) on Thursday May 18 2017, @07:21AM (#511578) Homepage

    Seems to have worked well enough for several million generations.

    I reckon the brain probably knows what it's doing in most cases.

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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18 2017, @08:12AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18 2017, @08:12AM (#511590)

    Religion worked well enough for thousands of years, but these days you smug snakes deride the soft headed idiots who believe in the magical sky fairy. The brain invented religion, so which is it, hypocrite? Do you have faith in the brain or don't you?

    • (Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Thursday May 18 2017, @03:17PM (1 child)

      by linkdude64 (5482) on Thursday May 18 2017, @03:17PM (#511704)

      Religion is something the ego of man invented over thousands of years, once nature took him from literally dirt, up to an upright sapien that could conceive of the universe.

      Which is more convincing of possessed talent?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18 2017, @05:27PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18 2017, @05:27PM (#511749)

        I like the dogmatic style of dismissive statements about religion.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18 2017, @06:32PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18 2017, @06:32PM (#511778)

      but these days you smug snakes deride the soft headed idiots who believe in the magical sky fairy.

      You know, "The Smug Snakes of Aleroth" would be a great name for a rock band. (w/apologies to Dave Barry.)

    • (Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday May 18 2017, @07:47PM

      by ledow (5567) on Thursday May 18 2017, @07:47PM (#511803) Homepage

      Call me when there's an active religion several million generations old, and we'll talk.

      Best we can manage is a few thousand.

  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday May 18 2017, @05:40PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday May 18 2017, @05:40PM (#511755) Journal

    Not much of an evolutionary cost for false positives.

    If you think the tiger-shaped rock is a tiger and book it. You're fine. If you the the rock-shaped tiger isn't, and don't, you're dead.