A recent American study revealed that the visual chaos that appears in our field of vision changes how information flows in the brain.
The study was conducted by researchers from Yale University in the United States of America, and was published on October 22 in Neuron magazine, and the EurekAlert website wrote about it.
Visual chaos
Visual clutter refers to everything that is in the background of our field of vision while we focus on a particular object; When you read a book or look at someone, the things you focus on are not completely isolated from the surroundings around them, and this surroundings are what is meant by visual clutter.
According to the journal Trends in Cognitive Science, visual crowding is defined as the inability to distinguish objects in clutter, which constitutes a fundamental obstacle to conscious visual perception.
The results of this study contribute to clarifying the neural basis of the perception process, and provide a deeper understanding of the function of the visual cortex in the brain.
Previous research has shown that visual clutter affects the target of visual perception to different degrees, depending on where that clutter is in relation to where you are currently looking, says Anirvan Nandy, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Yale University and one of the study’s lead authors. For example, “If I were asked to read the word cat out of the corner of my eye, the letter t would have a much greater impact than the letter c on my inability to accurately identify the letter a, even though both letters are the same distance from the letter a.” This phenomenon is visual crowding.
“For this reason, we cannot read from the corner of our eyes no matter how hard we try,” Dr. Nandy adds. “This challenge reflects the difficulty we have in distinguishing things when they are surrounded by clutter and we try to see them from the edge of our field of vision.”
In this new study, the researchers sought to understand what specifically happens in the brain when there is this visual chaos. The research team trained a type of monkey – which has a visual system similar to the human visual system – to focus on the center of a display screen while visual stimuli were presented within its range of vision. And outside. Meanwhile, the researchers recorded neural activity in the monkeys’ primary visual cortex, which represents the brain’s primary input into processing visual information.
The results of the study showed that the specific location of the clutter within the monkey’s visual field did not significantly affect how information was transmitted between neurons in the primary visual cortex, but it did affect the efficiency of the flow of this information. In other words, the location of visual clutter did not affect the order in which objects were perceived visually, but it reduced the quality of visual image transmission.
“Visual clutter in one location may stimulate information in a particular layer of the primary visual cortex to a lesser extent than clutter in another location,” adds Monica Gade, one of the study’s co-authors.
New discovery
The researchers also revealed a general property of the visual cortex that was previously unknown.
It is previously known that there are areas in the brain involved in the process of seeing and distinguishing between objects, as information is passed through these areas in a specific order. For example, the primary visual cortex sends a set of information to the secondary visual cortex, which in turn sends this information to the next area.
“What was previously understood was that there are complex processes that occur within each individual visual area, and the outputs of these processes are then transmitted to the next area in the visual sequence to complete the entire object recognition process,” says Dr. Jade.
But what the researchers found in this new study is that there are also subunits within these larger regions that carry out special operations and transfer part of this information to other subunits.
“This discovery fills the gap that existed between different fields that study visual vision,” says Dr. Nandy.
What’s next?
Researchers are currently studying how chaos affects information processing between brain regions, and also how focusing on a specific point affects these processes.
“For example, when you’re driving, you might look at the car in front of you, but you might also direct your attention to the car in the adjacent lane as you try to see if it’s approaching you,” Dr. Nandy explains.
Hence, the visual detail you get is mostly from the car in front of you, but the information that is most important to you lies outside your immediate focus.
Dr. Jade says, “Although you do not get the most accurate information possible when looking to the side, during that time you can perceive the area that you are observing to the side well and better than the one that you direct your gaze to directly in front of you. How does this happen? And how does focus affect the flow of information in the visual cortex?” “This is what we seek to explore.”