All articles tagged with #perception
Your bathroom mirror shows a left-right flipped face you’ve spent years learning to like; due to the mere-exposure effect, most people prefer this mirrored image, while the true, non-flipped image—the face others see—feels less familiar. Photos often look off because you’re seeing the version the world recognizes, not the one you’ve grown attached to, effectively creating two parallel selves that rarely meet in your own view.
Northwestern researchers unveiled Phantom Twist, a drone designed to fade from human sight by spinning so fast that motion blur makes it nearly invisible; created via AI-driven optimization to maximize perceptual invisibility and presented at RSS 2026 in Sydney. While potentially useful for wildlife observation, the drone is currently noisy and would require substantial quieting before practical use around animals or people who could hear it approaching.
Northwestern engineers unveiled Phantom Twist, a drone that spins at 15–25 Hz to create motion blur that makes it nearly invisible to the human eye; the design uses a counter-rotating arrangement and AI-driven optimization to minimize recognizable features while maintaining flight, but the prototype currently relies on an external tracking system and is still audible, with future versions potentially quieter and more transparent for uses like wildlife monitoring, infrastructure inspection, and wetlands surveys.
A study of 150 young women found that sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) does not confer sharper hearing, vision, smell, or other senses. Objective lab tests showed no consistent evidence of heightened sensory thresholds, and associations with sensitivity weakened after accounting for neuroticism and extraversion. The findings suggest SPS reflects how people experience and interpret sensory input rather than true sensory acuity, though limitations include the female, young sample and a single-time measurement.
Waymo’s flooded-road incident shows a perception-to-action flaw: sensors clearly detected water and the car slowed, but the decision stack chose a risky continuation, prompting a recall of 3,791 vehicles while a permanent fix is developed. The piece contrasts sensor architectures across platforms (Tesla Vision, Uber Avride, Zoox) to illustrate how each handles water hazards and edge cases, underscoring that riders must know which system they’re on and whether flood-detection logic has been patched.
The article explains that some people can spot a hidden baby in a blotchy image, illustrating how the brain constructs reality through pattern recognition and context. Citing a 2015 Cambridge study, it discusses how predictive brain processes can make people see what isn’t there, linking this to mild hallucinations while noting such perceptual guessing is common and not necessarily a sign of illness. It also suggests seeing the hidden figure reflects cognitive flexibility and observational skill rather than a mental health issue.
Deliberately slowing or pacing breathing alters how accurately people recognize emotions in faces: slow exhale reduces accuracy while slow inhale can enhance perceptual sensitivity. MEG data suggest the breathing rhythm can desynchronize brain waves from respiration, changing communication between networks that interpret fearful versus neutral expressions. The study used paced breathing with 31 participants and blended facial images, and notes caveats like fixed breathing rates and other physiological factors. Published in European Journal of Neuroscience by Shen-Mou Hsu and Chih-Hsin Tseng.
A new review argues that categorization is not a neutral perceptual step but an action-oriented, predictive function: the brain prepares motor plans before fully perceiving a stimulus, compressing input into abstract categories via feedback-dominated networks and beta/gamma rhythms, with implications for understanding mental health conditions like depression and autism.
New single‑cell recordings show that many neurons in the ventral temporal cortex fire during both seeing and imagining objects; researchers could reconstruct viewed images from brain activity, and about 40% of imagery‑related neurons reactivated in line with the original patterns, indicating imagination uses largely the same cellular machinery as perception with implications for memory, creativity, and PTSD therapies.
Enculturated chimpanzees at a Madrid sanctuary repeatedly preferred crystals over ordinary rocks, inspecting their transparency and shape, and even sorting them into groups. The behavior mirrors perceptual biases that may have guided early human cognition toward recognizing symmetry and Euclidean form, potentially influencing the development of symbolic thought—though the study is small and requires replication in wild apes.
New research shows that how a person walks—especially arm and leg swing amplitude—can signal their emotional state. In experiments, observers correctly guessed emotions from point-light gait videos, with bigger swings associated with anger and smaller swings with sadness or fear; altering swing amplitude made these emotions easier to infer, suggesting gait is a key nonverbal cue with potential applications in CCTV screening and mood-monitoring wearables, though ethical considerations remain.
Buffalo Bills signed safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson and, in his introductory press conference, pushed back on the idea that he's a poor teammate, saying the perception doesn't matter and that he plans to build relationships and contribute as he adapts to a new team.
Newly hatched chicks (1–3 days old) show the bouba/kiki effect: hearing 'bouba' makes most move toward rounded shapes, while 'kiki' nudges them toward spiky shapes, suggesting crossmodal shape-sound links exist in birds and are not tied to language.
A new study suggests that two-month-old infants can distinguish between different objects, indicating early, more sophisticated perceptual processing than previously thought.
The Moon looks larger near the horizon due to the Moon Illusion, a brain-based effect in which our perception of distance and size is distorted by contextual cues (like trees, buildings, or a flat horizon). Refraction actually makes the Moon look squished, not bigger, so the size increase is not atmospheric. The leading explanation involves Emmert's Law: the retina records the Moon’s size, but we judge its distance and thus its apparent size based on context, a two-step process that makes horizon objects appear larger even though nothing about the Moon’s actual distance changes.