Brain complexity: vision system (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, February 03, 2016, 19:22 (2998 days ago) @ David Turell

The vision we have does not begin at birth. it has to develop as the baby begins to try to see:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/illusion-chasers/what-little-babies-see-that-you-no-longer-can/?WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20160203-Please look at the pictures:-"Take a look at the red chips on the two Rubik cubes below. They are actually orange on the left and purple on the right, if you look at them in isolation. They only appear more or less equally red across the images because your brain is interpreting them as red chips lit by either yellow or blue light. This kind of misperception is an example of perceptual constancy, the mechanism that allows you to recognize an object as being the same in different environments, and under very diverse lighting conditions.-***-"There are many indications that constancy effects must have helped us survive (and continue to do so). One such clue is that we are not born with perceptual constancy, but develop it many months after birth. So at first we see all differences, and then we learn to ignore certain types of differences so that we can recognize the same object as unchanging in many varied scenarios. When perceptual constancy arises, we lose the ability to detect multiple contradictions that are nevertheless highly noticeable to young babies.-***-"The data revealed that, before developing perceptual constancy, 3- to 4-month-old babies have a “striking ability” to discriminate image differences due to changes in illumination that are not salient for adults. They lose this superior skill around the age of 5 months. Then, at 7-8 months of age, they develop the ability to discriminate surface properties such as glossy vs matte (which they maintain until adulthood), so they end up perceiving glossy surfaces as very different from matte ones (just as we adults do), even if most of their physical properties remain otherwise unchanged.-"The discrimination of surfaces is not the only perceptual domain where we abandon reality for illusion as we grow up. During the first year of life, infants suffer the loss of a myriad discriminatory powers: among them, the ability to recognize differences in monkey faces that are hardly detectable to adult humans, and the ability to distinguish speech sounds in languages other than spoken by their own families. Objective differences become subjective similitudes.-"The loss of sensitivity to variant information that we all experienced as babies created an unbreachable gap between us and the physical world. At the same time, it served to tune our perception to our environment, allowing us to navigate it efficiently and successfully... even if it left a large portion of reality forever outside our reach."-Comment: Romansh is correct. What we see are illusions, but what do you expect? What arrives at the optic cortex are charged ions running along nerve fibers, which are then interpreted as vision. Note the article agrees with me. The brain does this to help us survive. We are not cameras!