Scientists have long known that our sensory processing must automatically screen out extraneous inputs โ otherwise, we couldnโt experience the world as we do.
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And automatic background subtraction, it turns out, can also manifest in intriguing, unexpected ways. Takeย a counterintuitive findingย that [neuroscientist Duje] Tadin and his colleagues made in 2003: Weโre good at perceiving the movements of small objects, but if those objects are simply made bigger, we find it much more difficult to detect their motion.
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Recently inย Nature Communications, Tadinโs team offered a tantalizing explanation for why this happens: The brain prioritizes the detection of objects that are more important for us to see, and those tend to be smaller. To a hawk hunting for its next meal, a mouse suddenly darting through a field matters more than the swaying motion of the grass and trees around it. As a result, Tadin and his team discovered, the brain suppresses information about the movement of the background โ and as a side effect, it has more difficulty perceiving the movements of larger objects, because it treats them as a kind of background, too.
Read full, original post: Your Brain Chooses What to Let You See
