A quick glance is enough to tell if we really saw something

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-05-25 09:01

Australia; VIC

A quick glance is all it takes to know what we actually saw and separate it from what we did not see, according to Australian research. The researchers asked people to look at an image for a fraction of a second, and then say whether small image fragments were part of the original image they saw or not. They found that people were more than 80% accurate in separating out the patches that were in the original images from patches that were not. The authors say this shows that even a brief glance can be highly informative.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

How much can we differentiate at a brief glance: Revealing the truer limit in conscious contents through the Massive Report Paradigm (MRP)

Royal Society Open Science

Upon a brief glance, how well can we tell what we see from what we do not? To answer this question, we asked people to see an image for a very short time, and judge whether small image fragments were part of the image they saw or not. We found that participants were highly accurate in this task, and we concluded that a brief glance is highly informative.

Journal/
conference: Royal Society Open Science

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Monash University

Funder: Liang Qianchen, Regan Gallagher and Naotsugu Tsuchiya were supported by Australian Research Council (DP180104128 and DP180100396). Naotsugu Tsuchiya was also supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council (APP1183280) and Grant-in-Aid for Transformative Research Areas (B) (HDM5Y) from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

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