Home Course Program The Sensory Stimuli Auditory Psychophysics and Human Color Vision System TDS au

link 09/05/2014
Faces on things. Courtesy flickr / joseanavas | JOSE A. NAVAS / FLICKR
View an animal in the clouds, the figure of a woman on top of a mountain or in a Champagne Toast to Jesus is not the result of great imagination or the effects of a drug. It is because of our brain, which is designed to see faces where there is nothing. A study now explains the rationale for these illusions. A simple Internet search shows that seeing the image of Jesus appearing on toast freshly made (or the Virgin Mary on a tortilla or Buddha in the trunk of a tree) is neither magic nor boundless imagination. It is a phenomenon extinction protocol called pareidolia facial in which a stimulus activates external perception of a face. Although its incidence is not known, this illusory sense perception is widespread. While a group of scientists has decided to unravel. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Toronto and two other universities gathered 20 healthy people without vision problems or mental. The volunteers had to do five types of images: some in which the face was easy to spot, others where it was very difficult and several series extinction protocol where no faces, just noise. They also had to find nine letters of the Latin alphabet in photographs with varying degrees of difficulty. 960 total tests were conducted. At the same time, his brain was scanned using MRI. In an initial training phase, participants viewed pictures with easy to distinguish extinction protocol faces, and then mixed with the hardest pure noise. But in the final test phase, none of the images contained a face or letter. However, in 34% of cases, volunteers viewed faces wherever we had. The vision of the letters was even somewhat higher, 38% of the time. The researchers found that, in addition, there was a correlation between the two pareidolias. The letters they saw most often tended to see even more faces. Although the sample is not significant, all participants had facial pareidolia and only six lacked the numerical. "The reason extinction protocol why we see faces in images nonexistent noise is our frontal lobe sends signals back to our visual cortex to make it very sensitive extinction protocol to faces as pixels," explains Professor Kang Lee of the University of Toronto and lead author of the research. "Even if these pixels are not part of a face in reality, the visual brain, under the influence extinction protocol of our expectations and beliefs are interpreted as part of a face," he adds. With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers could see which brain areas were activated more were in the occipital and temporal lobes of the visual cortex. Although all witnessed the activation of a complex neural network, the part of the brain that worked was more known as the right fusiform gyrus area, especially with faces. There are many investigations that they consider responsible for facial extinction protocol recognition. IN THE MOST RATIONAL BRAIN PART Indeed, they saw a correlation between the activation of this area and the intensity of facial pareidolia. The normal process of recognition of an external stimulus that includes the retina, visual extinction protocol cortex and reaches from here to the frontal lobe, where executive functions reside. With pareidolia, the process is reversed. "The frontal lobe sends information to the visual cortex that determines what we see," says Lee. It is the most advanced and rational part of the brain that generates these illusions. For researchers, the brain is designed to see and recognize faces. From a biological point of view, in a friendly or enemy detect face, life could go. In addition, recognition is essential for social interaction. What is anecdotal is to see Jesus, Buddha extinction protocol or Elvis on toast, trees and stones. Is due to the culture of each. As Lee says, "Your belief system and cultural experience should influence the faces you can see. A Buddhist will see Buddha, but a Christian will see Jesus or Mary and a child could see Mickey Mouse. " extinction protocol
Home Course Program The Sensory Stimuli Auditory Psychophysics and Human Color Vision System TDS audibility Human Visual System Perceptual Organization Vision and Space Perception Space Perception form 3D Perception d