Being certain but wrong: Compression of redundant information and the limits of seeing

Typical visual scenes contain too much information to be processed by the human brain because processing capacities are limited. To cope with excessive information, the visual system selects, discards, and compresses information, for example, when only a subset of stimuli within a scene is selected by attention. Another way to reduce information is to compress redundancies present in visual scenes: In ‘redundancy masking’, a mechanism we recently discovered, the visual system reduces the perceived number of items in repeating patterns. For example, when presented with three items in the peripheral visual field, observers often report seeing only two items. Interestingly, observers are highly confident about the accuracy of their erroneous reports. Here, we will discuss redundancy masking, and how confusions of percepts with states in the world limit the capacity to see and our notions of reality.  

This talk is part of the series Invited Speakers - Faculty of Psychology. It will take place in Brig, on the groundfloor of UniDistance Suisse's headquarters. You may also join online. The link for participation in the event is the following: http://bit.ly/unidistance.