The Illusion of Visual Stability in Change Blindness

Article: Like our social media feeds, our brains take a little while to update
Source: University of California, Berkeley
Published: January 12, 2022

The presence of noise accompanying visual stimuli
led to attraction to an earlier point in the video

Visual perception is like a movie that plays when our eyes are open. This movie is rich in constantly changing visual stimuli. Yet, the "continuity field," the experience that our brain merges what we see on a constant basis, is merely an illusion of visual stability. Rather than seeing the most recent image in real time, we actually see earlier versions as our brain refreshes and consolidates visual input roughly every 15 seconds. This can be influenced by the amount of noise accompanying the visual stimuli; the more noise present, the greater the lag. Senior author of the study states, "If our brains were always updating in real time, the world would be a jittery place with constant fluctuations in shadow, light and movement." In the present study, researchers looked at the mechanism behind change blindness, in which we don't notice subtle changes in time (or space). They recruited 100 participants, who were asked to view several 30-second time-lapse videos of faces morphing in age or between genders. The results showed that when asked to identify the face they saw after viewing the video, the participants almost consistently picked a frame they viewed halfway through the video (roughly 15 seconds into the video). Frames were balanced in the sense of presenting in both "ascending" and "descending" order. Additional experiments exploring longer video durations might provide further insight. Still, the study's senior author offers a plausible explanation for the observations: "It's too much work to constantly update images, so it [our brain] sticks to the past because the past is a good predictor of the present. We recycle information from the past because it's faster, more efficient and less work."

My rating of this study: ⭐🌸

Manassi M and Whitney D. "Illusion of visual stability through active perceptual serial dependence." Science Advances.  8(2). 12 January 2022. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abk2480