It’s a classic visual illusion: Two gray dots appear on a background that consists of a gradient from light gray to black.
Although the two dots are identical, they appear very different based on where they are placed against the background.
Scientists who study the brain have been trying to figure out the mechanism behind this illusion, known as simultaneous brightness contrast, for more than 100 years.
An MIT-led study now suggests that this phenomenon relies on brightness estimation that takes place before visual information reaches the brain’s visual cortex, possibly within the retina.
“All of our experiments point to the conclusion that this is a low-level phenomenon,” says Pawan Sinha, a professor of vision and computational neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
“The results help answer the question of what is the mechanism that underlies this very fundamental process of brightness estimation, which is a building block of many other kinds of visual analyses.”
As one part of their investigation, the researchers studied blind children in India and found that they were susceptible to this illusion almost immediately after their sight was initiated after surgery, offering further evidence that brightness estimations are likely based on simple neural circuitry that doesn’t require any prior visual experience to be set up.
Sinha is the senior author of the study, which appears in the August issue of Vision Research. Other authors of the paper are Sarah Crucilla, who worked with Sinha while she was in high school and is now a Caltech undergraduate; Tapan Gandhi, a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Technology and a former postdoc at MIT; Dylan Rose, a recent Northeastern University PhD recipient; Amy Singh of Google, who is also a former MIT postdoc; Suma Ganesh and Umang Mathur of Dr. Shroff’s Charity Eye Hospital in New Delhi; and Peter Bex, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University.
Estimating brightness
When we look at an image, our brain perceives a certain brightness at each location of the image.
Surprisingly, however, our brightness percepts are not always proportional to the amount of light emanating from image regions, Sinha says. Instead, our perception is the product of the object’s actual color and the amount of light that is shining on it.
“You could have a really dark piece of cloth under a bright spotlight, and the amount of light that you get from it could be the same as, or even more than, the amount of light from a white piece of paper under dim light,” Sinha says.
“The brain is presented with the challenge of figuring out how light or dark a surface is based on just the amount of energy it’s receiving. In essence, the brain has to figure out the two numbers that were multiplied (illumination level and surface darkness) to produce the one number it is receiving (incoming energy) — a seemingly impossible task since infinitely many pairs of numbers can all yield the same product.”
Some scientists, including the 19th century German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, an early pioneer of vision studies, suggested that estimating brightness is a “high-level” process.
That is, the brain estimates brightness based on a high-level understanding of the lighting conditions, shapes, and shadows in the environment that it’s seeing.
Many visual tasks, such as identifying faces or objects, do rely on our previous experiences or expectations about what we’re seeing. However, the experiments that Sinha and his colleagues performed in this study suggest that in the case of brightness estimation, high-level processing does not play a significant role.
In their first set of experiments, the researchers created an image of a cube that appeared to be lit from the side, with one face appearing a little brighter than the other. In reality, using a clever trick that Chinese ceramic painters knew over 800 years ago, the face that looked brighter actually had lower luminance than the face that looked darker.
In this display, the researchers found that when identical gray dots were placed on the two cube faces, the dot that was on the face that seemed to be in shadow actually appeared darker than an identical dot placed on a face that was receiving more light.
“This is the opposite of what happens in standard simultaneous contrast displays, in which a dot on a dark background appears brighter than a dot on a light background,” Sinha says. “This result runs counter to the idea that high-level analysis of lighting conditions contributes to brightness estimation.”
The second set of experiments was designed to localize the processes of brightness estimation. It built on the curious fact that the unified view of the world we experience, constructed by merging images from the two eyes, is accompanied by an almost complete loss of “eye of origin” information.
We do not know what the original images were, and which eye they came from; we are only aware of the merged view (sometimes called the “cyclopean” image, after the one-eyed monster Cyclops of Greek mythology).
However, using specially designed images and stereo glasses, the researchers found that brightness estimation did not need to wait until information from the two eyes was merged; it had already occurred by that point.
This finding suggests that brightness estimation occurs very early, before information coming from each eye is combined into one visual stream. The combination occurs in a part of the brain’s cortex called V1 (so named because it represents the first stage of visual processing in the cortex). This places a tight constraint on the location of processing; the researchers hypothesize that significant brightness computation most likely takes place in the retina.
“The implication of results from the first two sets of studies was that if brightness estimation is really a low-level process, and the circuitry is located as early as the retina, then perhaps this is an innate dispensation,” Sinha says. “This is something that the visual system comes prepared to do, right from birth.”
“An innate mechanism”
The researchers were able to explore this hypothesis by studying blind children who had recently had their sight restored. Sinha runs an effort in India called Project Prakash, whose mission is to treat children suffering from preventable forms of blindness such as congenital cataracts. Many of the treated children go on to participate in scientific studies of visual development, although treatment is not contingent on such participation.
“The prediction was that if brightness estimation is truly an innate mechanism, then right after sight is initiated in children who were congenitally blind, they should fall prey to the simultaneous contrast illusion,” Sinha says.
That is exactly what the researchers found, in a study of nine children who had cataracts surgically removed between the ages of 8 and 17. All of the children were susceptible to the illusion, in tests done just 24 to 48 hours after their surgical bandages were removed.
In a 2015 study, Sinha showed that recently sighted children are also immediately susceptible to two other visual illusions, known as the Müller-Lyer and Ponzo illusions, which involve judging the length of lines based on visual cues.
“The account that emerged from that work also seems to be consistent with the account that’s emerging from the brightness studies. That is, many of the phenomena that we are so quick to ascribe to high level inferential processes may actually be instantiated in some very simple circuit mechanisms of the brain that are innately available,” Sinha says.
“These results are contributing to the quest for understanding how our nervous systems solve the complex challenge of perceiving and understanding the world around us.”
Funding: The research was funded by the National Eye Institute/National Institutes of Health, the Nick Simons Family Foundation, the Sikand Foundation, and the Halis Family Foundation.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN REALITY AND OBJECT
Sensory perception is often the most striking proof of something factual – when we perceive something, we interpret it and take it as “objective”, “real”.
Most obviously, you can experience this with eyewitness testimonies: If an eyewitness has “seen it with the naked eye”, judges, jury members and attendees take the reports of these percepts not only as strong evidence, but usually as factdespite the active and biasing processes on basis of perception and memory.
Indeed, it seems that there is no better, no more “proof” of something being factual knowledge than having perceived it. The assumed link between perception and physical reality is particularly strong for the visual sense – in fact, we scrutinize it only when sight conditions have been unfortunate, when people have bad vision or when we know that the eyewitness was under stress or was lacking in cognitive faculties.
When people need even more proof of reality than via the naked eye, they intuitively try to touch the to-be-analyzed entity (if at all possible) in order to investigate it haptically. Feeling something by touch seems to be the ultimate perceptual experience in order for humans to speak of physical proof (Carbon and Jakesch, 2013).
We can analyze the quality of our perceptual experiences by standard methodological criteria. By doing so we can regularly find out that our perception is indeed mostly very reliable and also objective (Gregory and Gombrich, 1973) – but only if we employ standard definitions of “objective” as being consensual among different beholders.
Still, even by meeting these methodological criteria, we cannot give something in evidence about physical reality. It seems that knowledge about the physical properties of objects cannot be gained by perception, so perception is neither “veridical” nor “valid” in the strict sense of the words the properties of the “thing in itself ” remain indeterminate in any empirical sense (Kant, 1787/1998).
We “reliably” and “objec- tively” might perceive the sun going up in the morning and down in the evening; the physical relations are definitely different, as we have known at least since Nicolaus Copernicus’s proposed heliocentricism it might also be common sense that the Earth is a spheroid for most people, still the majority of people have neither perceived the Earth as spherical nor represented it like that; one reason for this is that in everyday life contexts the illusion of a plane works perfectly well to guide us in the planning and execution of our actions (Carbon, 2010b).
LIMITATIONS OF THE POSSIBILITY OF OBJECTIVE PERCEPTION
The limitations of perception are even more far reaching: our perception is not only limited when we do not have access to the thing in itself, it is very practically limited to the quality of processing and the general specifications of our perceptual system.
For instance, our acoustic sense can only register and process a very narrow band of frequencies ranging from about 16 Hz– 20 kHz as a young adult this band gets narrower and narrower with increasing age.
Typically, infrasonic and ultrasonic bands are just not perceivable despite being essential for other species such as elephants and bats, respectively. The perception of the environment and, consequently, the perception and representa- tion of the world as such, is different for these species what would be the favorite music of an elephant, which preference would a bat indicate if “honestly asked”?
What does infrasonic acoustics sound and feel like? Note: infrasonic frequencies can also be perceived by humans; not acoustically in a strict sense but via vibrations still, the resulting experiences are very dif- ferent (cf. Nagel, 1974). To make such information accessible we
need transformation techniques; for instance, a Geiger-Müller tube for making ionizing radiation perceivable as we have not developed any sensory system for detecting and feeling this band of extremely high frequency electromagnetic radiation.
But even if we have access to given information from the environmental world, it would be an illusion to think of “objective perception” of it differences in perception across different individuals seem to be obvious: this is one reason for different persons having different tastes, but it is even more extreme: even within a lifetime of one person, the perceptual qualities and quantities which we can process change.
Elderly people, for instance, often have yellowish corneas yielding biased color perception reducing the ability to detect and differentiate bluish color spectra. So even objectivity of perceptions in the sense of consensual experience is hardly achievable, even within one species, even within one individual just think of fashion phenomena (Carbon, 2011a), of changes in taste (Martindale, 1990) or the so-called cycle of preferences (Carbon, 2010a)! Clearly, so-called objective perception is impossible, it is an illusion.
ILLUSORY CONSTRUCTION OF THE WORLD
The problem with the idea of veridical perception of the world is further intensified when taking additional perceptual phenomena, which demonstrate highly constructive qualities of our perceptual system, into account.
A very prominent example of this kind is the perceptual effect which arises when any visual information which we want to process falls on the area of the retina where the so-called blind spot is located (see Figure 1).
Interestingly, visual information that is mapped on the blind spot is not just dropped this would be the easiest solution for the visual apparatus. It is also not rigidly interpolated, for instance, by just doubling neighbor information, but intelligently complemented by analysing the meaning and Gestalt of the context.
If we, for example, are exposed to a couple of lines, the perceptual system would complement the physically non-existing information of the blind spot by a best guess heuristic how the lines are interconnected in each case, mostly yielding a very close approximation to “reality” as it uses most probable solutions.
Finally, we experience clear visual information, seemingly in the same quality as the one which mirrors physical perception in the end, the “physical perception” and the “constructed perception”, are of the same quality, also because the “physical perception” is neither a depiction of physical reality, but is also constructed by top-down processes based on best guess heuristic as a kind of hypothesis testing or problem solving (Gregory, 1970).
Beside this prominent example which has become common knowledge up to now, a series of further phenomena exist where we can speak of full perceptual constructions of the world outside without any direct link to the physical realities.
A very intriguing example of this kind will be described in more detail in the following:
When we make fast eye movements (so-called saccades) our perceptual system is suppressed, with the result that we are functionally blind during such saccades. Actually, we do not perceive these blind moments of life although they are highly frequent and relatively long as such actually, Rayner et al. estimated that typical fixations last about 200–250 ms and saccades last about 20–40 ms (Rayner et al., 2001), so about 10% of our time when we are awake is susceptible to such suppression effects.
In accordance with other filling-in phenomena, missing data is filled up with the most plausible information: Such a process needs hypotheses about what is going on in the current situation and how the situation will evolve (Gregory, 1970, 1990).
If the hypotheses are misleading because the underlying mental model of the situation and its further genesis is incorrect, we face an essential problem: what we then perceive (or fail to perceive) is incompatible with the current situation, and so will mislead our upcoming action.
In most extreme cases, this could lead to fatal decisions: for instance: if the model does not construct a specific interfering object in our movement axis, we might miss information essential to changing our current trajectory resulting in a collision course.
In such a constellation, we would be totally startled by the crash, as we would not have perceived the target object at all this is not about missing an object but about entirely overlooking it due to a non-existing trace of perception.
Despite the knowledge about these characteristics of the visual system, we might doubt such processes as the mechanisms are working to so great an extent in most everyday life situations that it provides the perfect illusion of continuous, correct and super- detailed visual input.
We can, however, illustrate this mechanism very easily by just observing our eye movements in a mirror: when executing fast eye movements, we cannot observe them by directly inspecting our face in the mirror we can only perceive our fixations and the slow movements of the eyes.
If we, however, film the same scene with a video camera, the whole procedure looks totally different: Now we clearly also see the fast movements; so we can directly experience the specific operation of the visual system in this respect by comparing the same scene captured by two differently working visual systems: our own, very cognitively operating, visual system and the rigidly filming video system which just catches the scene frame by frame without further processing, interpreting and tuning it.1
[1]There is an interesting update in technology for demonstrating this effect putting forward by one of the reviewers. If you use the 2nd camera of your smartphone (the one for shooting “selfies”) or your notebook camera and you look at your depicted eyes very closely, then the delay of building up the film sequence is seemingly a bit longer than the saccadic suppression yielding the interesting effect of perceiving your own eye movements directly. Note: I have tried it out and it worked, by the way best when using older models which might take longer for building up the images. You will perceive your eye movements particular clearly when executing relatively large saccades, e.g., from the left periphery to the right and back.
We call this moment of temporary functional blindness phenomenon “saccade blindness” or “saccade suppression”, which again illustrates the illusionary aspects of human perception “saccadic suppression”, Bridgeman et al., 1975; “tactile suppression”, Ziat et al., 2010).
We can utilize this phenomena for testing interesting hypotheses on the mental representation of the visual environment: if we change details of a visual display during such functional blind phases of saccadic movements, people usually do not become aware of such changes, even if very important details, e.g., the expression of the mouth, are changed (Bohrn et al., 2010).
ILLUSIONS BY TOP-DOWN-PROCESSES
Gregory proposed that perception shows the quality of hypothesis testing and that illusions make us clear how these hypotheses are formulated and on which data they are based (Gregory, 1970). One of the key assumptions for hypothesis testing is that percep- tion is a constructive process depending on top-down processing.
Such top-down processes can be guided through knowledge gained over the years, but perception can also be guided by preformed capabilities of binding and interpreting specific forms as certain Gestalts.
The strong reliance of perception on top-down processing is the essential key for assuring reliable perceptual abil- ities in a world full of ambiguity and incompleteness. If we read a text from an old facsimile where some of the letters have vanished or bleached out over the years, where coffee stains have covered partial information and where decay processes have turned the originally white paper into a yellowish crumbly substance, we might be very successful in reading the fragments of the text, because our perceptual system interpolates and (re-)constructs (see Figure 2).
If we know or understand the general meaning of the target text, we will even read over some passages that do not exist at all: we fill the gaps through our knowledge we change the meaning towards what we expect.
A famous example which is often cited and shown in this realm is the so-called man-rat-illusion where an ambiguous sketch drawing is presented whose content is not clearly decipherable, but switches from showing a man to showing a rat another popular example of this kind is the bistable picture where the interpretation flips from an old woman to a young woman an v.v. (see Figure 3) most people interpret this example as a fascinating illusion demonstrating humans’ capability of switching from one meaning to another, but the example also demonstrates an even more intriguing process: what we will perceive at first glance is mainly guided through the specific activation of our semantic network.
FIGURE 3 | The young-old-woman illusion (also known as the My Wife and My Mother-In-Law illusion) already popular in Germany in the 19th century when having been frequently depicted on postcards. Boring (1930) was the first who presented this illusion in a scientific context (image on the right) calling it a “new” illusion (concretely, “a new ambiguous figure”) although it was very probably taken from an already displayed image of the 19th century within an A and P Condensed Milk advertisement (Lingelbach, 2014).
If we have been exposed to a picture of a man before, or if we think of a man or have heard the word “man”, the chance is strongly increased that our perceptual system interprets the ambiguous pattern towards a depiction of a man if the prior experiences were more associated with a rat, a mouse or another animal of such a kind, we will, in contrast, tend to interpret the ambiguous pattern more as a rat.
So, we can literally say that we perceive what we know if we have no prior knowledge of certain things we can even overlook important details in a pattern because we have no strong association with something meaningful.
The intimate processing between sensory inputs and our semantic networks enables us to recognize familiar objects within a few milliseconds, even if they show the complexity of human faces (Locher et al., 1993; Willis and Todorov, 2006; Carbon, 2011b).
Top-down processes are powerful in schematizing and easing- up perceptual processes in the sense of compressing the “big data” of the sensory inputs towards tiny data packages with pre-categorized labels on such schematized “icons” (Carbon, 2008).
Top-down processes, however, are also susceptible to char- acteristic fallacies or illusions due to their guided, model-based nature: When we have only a brief time slot for a snapshot of a complex scene, the scene is (if we have associations with the general meaning of the inspected scene at all) so simplified that specific details get lost in favor of the processing and interpreta- tion of the general meaning of the whole scene.
Biederman (1981) impressively demonstrated this by exposing participants to a sketch drawing of a typical street scene where typical objects are placed in a prototypical setting, with the exception that a visible hydrant in the foreground was not positioned on the pavement besides a car but unusually directly on the car.
When people were exposed to such a scene for only 150 ms, followed by a scrambled backward mask, they “re-arranged” the setting by top-down processes based on their knowledge of hydrants and their typical positions on pavements.
In this specific case, people have indeed been deceived, because they report a scene which was in accordance with their knowledge but not with the assessment of the presented scene but for everyday actions this seems unproblematic.
Although you might indeed lose the link to the fine-detailed structure of a specific entity when strongly relying on top-down processes, such an endeavor works quite brilliantly in most cases as it is a best guess estima- tion or approximation it works particularly well when we are running out of resources, e.g., when we are in a specific mode of being pressed for time and/or you are engaged in a series of other cognitive processes.
Actually, such a mode is the standard mode in everyday life. However, even if we had the time and no other processes needed to be executed, we would not be able to adequately process the big data of the sensory input.
The whole idea of this top-down processing with schematized perception stems from F. C. Bartlett’s pioneering series of experiments in a variety of domains (Bartlett, 1932). Bartlett already showed that we do not read the full information from a visual display or a narrative, but that we rely on schemata reflecting the essence of things, stories, and situations being strongly shaped by prior knowledge and its specific activation (see for a critical reflection of Bartlett’s method Carbon and Albrecht, 2012).
PERCEPTION AS A GRAND ILLUSION
RECONSTRUCTING HUMAN PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY
There is clearly an enormous gap between the big data provided by the external world and our strictly limited capacity to process them. The gap widens even further when taking into account that we not only have to process the data but ultimately have to make clear sense of the core of the given situation.
The goal is to make one (and only one) decision based on the unambiguous interpretation of this situation in order to execute an appropriate action. This very teleological way of processing needs inhibitory capabilities for competing interpretations to strictly favor one single interpretation which enables fast action without quarrelling about alternatives.
In order to realize such a clear interpretation of a situation, we need a mental model of the external world which is very clear and without ambiguities and indeterminacies. Ideally, such a model is a kind of caricature of physical reality: If there is an object to be quickly detected, the figure-ground contrast, e.g., should be intensified.
If we need to identify the borders of an object under unfavorable viewing conditions, it is helpful to enhance the transitions from one border to another, for instance. If we want to easily diagnose the ripeness of a fruit desired for eating, it is most helpful when color saturation is amplified for familiar kinds of fruits.
Our perceptual system has exactly such capabilities of intensifying, enhancing and amplifying the result is the generation of schematic, prototyp- ical, sketch-like perceptions and representations.
Any metaphor for perception as a kind of tool which makes photos is fully misleading because perception is much more than blueprinting: it is a cognitive process aiming at reconstructing any scene at its core.
All these “intelligent perceptual processes” can most easily be demonstrated by perceptual illusions: For instance, when we look at the inner horizontal bar of Figure 4, we observe a continuous shift from light to dark gray and from left to right, although there is no physical change in the gray value in fact only one gray value is used for creating this region.
The illusion is induced by the distribution of the peripheral gray values which indeed show a continuous shift of gray levels, although in a reverse direction. The phenomenon of simultaneous contrast helps us to make the contrast clearer; helping us to identify figure-ground relations more easily, more quickly and more securely.
A similar principle of intensifying given physical relations by the perceptual system is now known as the Chevreul-Mach bands (see Figure 5), independently introduced by chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul (see Chevreul, 1839) and by physicist and philosopher Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach (Mach, 1865).
Via the process of lateral inhibition, luminance changes from one bar to another are exaggerated, specifically at the edges of the bars. This helps to differentiate between the different areas and to trigger edge-detection of the bars.
CONSTRUCTING HUMAN PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY
This reconstructive capability is impressive and helps us to get rid of ambiguous or indeterminate percepts. However, the power of perception is even more intriguing when we look at a related phenomenon.
When we analyze perceptual illusions where entities or relations are not only enhanced in their recognizability but even entirely constructed without a physical correspondence, then we can quite rightly speak of the “active construction” of human psychological reality. A very prominent example is the Kanizsa triangle (Figure 6) where we clearly perceive illusory contours and related Gestalts actually, none of them exists at all in a physical sense. The illusion is so strong that we have the feeling of being able to grasp even the whole configuration.
To detect and recognize such Gestalts is very important for us. Fortunately, we are not only equipped with a cognitive mechanism helping us to perceive such Gestalts, but we also feel rewarded when having recognized them as Gestalts despite indeterminate patterns (Muth et al., 2013): in the moment of the insight for a Gestalt the now determinate pattern gains liking (the so-called “Aesthetic-Aha-effect”, Muth and Carbon, 2013).
The detection and recognition process adds affective value to the pattern which leads to the activation of even more cognitive energy to deal with it as it now means something to us.
Source:
MIT
