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Brain lives 15 seconds 'in past' + People are fast & accurate at high-value decisions

#1
C C Offline
Study: human brain lives 15 seconds 'in the past'
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/human-...d/1054962/

INTRO: The human brain is living 15 seconds in the past, as opposed to updating your vision in real-time, in order to help you see the world with stability, a new study has found.

Researchers from the University of California-Berkeley compared their discovery to social media — our brains are constantly uploading rich, visual stimuli, not unlike Facebook or Instagram, but instead of seeing the latest image in real-time, we are actually seeing earlier versions because our brain’s refresh time is about 15 seconds.

The findings provide new insight into what scientists call the "continuity field," a function of perception in which our brain merges what we see on a constant basis to give us a sense of visual stability.

"If our brains were always updating in real-time, the world would be a jittery place with constant fluctuations in shadow, light and movement, and we’d feel like we were hallucinating all the time,” explained study senior author David Whitney, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology, neuroscience, and vision science, in a university release.

"Our brain is like a time machine. It keeps sending us back in time. It’s like we have an app that consolidates our visual input every 15 seconds into one impression so we can handle everyday life," added study lead author Mauro Manassi, an assistant professor of psychology at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen and former postdoctoral fellow in Whitney’s lab at UC Berkeley... (MORE - details)


People are fast and accurate when making high-value decisions
https://news.osu.edu/people-are-fast-and...decisions/

RELEASE: When people choose between two high-value items, their decisions tend to be fast and accurate, a new study showed – exactly the opposite of what many scientists expected. Researchers have long thought that people are less sensitive to changes in value as the overall value of an item increases.

For example, it seems like it should be more difficult to tell the difference between a $50,000 car and a $55,000 car than between a $5,000 car and $10,000 car. Even though the difference in value is the same, the fraction of the total value is much smaller in the higher priced car, supposedly making it harder to notice.

Ian Krajbich“In our studies, we found just the opposite,” said Ian Krajbich, co-author of the study and professor of psychology and economics at The Ohio State University. “Our results showed that in high-value decisions, people were more accurate – they were making better decisions than when they chose between low-value items. And while they could make those decisions quickly, they also slowed down and considered the options more carefully when we told them they were going to make a high-value decision.”

The study was released today (Jan. 31, 2022) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was led by Blair Shevlin, a doctoral student in psychology at Ohio State.

The idea that people are less sensitive to changes as the magnitude increases has a long history in the sciences. In various disciplines, it is called either the Weber-Fechner Law, diminishing marginal utility or divisive normalization.

And it makes intuitive sense. It is harder for a person to tell the difference between two heavy weights – say 100 lbs. vs. 105 lbs. – than between light weights of 5 and 10 lbs. Similarly, it would be difficult to tell which of two rock concerts was louder, but easy to tell the difference in loudness between a whisper and a shout.

But this new study suggests that people may respond differently to value than they do in other domains, Krajbich said. In three separate computer-based studies, Krajbich and his colleagues found that people could tell the difference in value between different types of high-value objects faster and more accurately than low-value objects in the same domain.

In one study, the researchers had participants rate their desire to eat 144 snack foods on a scale of 0 to 10. In the next part of the experiment, they were shown two food items and asked to select the food they would most like to eat at the end of the experiment.

Sometimes participants were shown two foods they rated very high (8 and 9, for example) and sometimes two foods they rated low (2 and 3, for example).

Results showed that participants were more likely to accurately choose their higher-rated food (from earlier in the experiment) and also chose more quickly when the decision involved two highly rated foods, rather than two low-rated snacks.

Similar results were found in another group of participants when they rated abstract art on a scale of 0-10. Just as in the first experiment, they later were faster and more accurate in choosing among art they rated higher when asked which piece of art they would most like to take home.

The third experiment didn’t rely on participants’ subjective value statements. In this experiment, they were shown multi-color blocks, like one side of a Rubik’s Cube, whose colors ranged across a spectrum from blue to pink. The blocks were given points associated with cash values ranging from about 20 cents to $2.50.

The values were low on one end of the color spectrum and rose to the highest levels on the other end of the spectrum. As in the other experiments, the participants were later given multiple chances to choose between two blocks. Sometimes they were both high-value blocks – $2 and $2.25, for example – and sometimes they were both of low value, such as 25 cents and 50 cents.

Again, participants were faster and more accurate choosing between the high-value blocks than they were when the choice was between two low-value blocks.

There was one other twist to the experiments. In half of the decisions in each experiment, the researchers alerted participants ahead of time what kind of decision they were going to make: a decision between high-value items or between low-value items.

“The idea was that if people knew they were going to choose between two high-value options, they might be happy with either one, so they wouldn’t need to spend as much time or effort on the decision. With the low-value decisions, it might matter more that they choose the right one,” Krajbich said. “But again, we found the opposite. When we alerted them, people slowed down for the high-value decisions, as if they thought those were more important to get right.”

Remember that in these decisions, the difference in value between the two high-value options was the same as the difference in value between the two low-value options. So why do people treat high-value decisions differently, especially when they act so differently in other sensory domains? “It may be that there is a factor we didn’t know about before, which is unique to value, that leads people to act differently,” Krajbich said.

“When people see valuable items, their brains may enter a heightened state of arousal and they become more engaged in their decisions. And with advanced warning, people seem to consciously slow down to make even better decisions between high-value, highly attractive options.” Other co-authors were Stephanie Smith, a PhD graduate of Ohio State now at UCLA, and Jan Hausfeld of the University of Amsterdam.
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#2
stryder Offline
@ human brain lives 15 seconds 'in the past'

Without going too indepth that can be kind of debunked, for instance if someone punches you in eye, you have the change to dodge, you don't suddenly get an "ouchy" and then see it occur 15 seconds later.  It would suggest that rather than 15 seconds, it's more likely milliseconds (around 250ms for visual). 

That being said, it could be suggested that the brain is a stiffening medium that can entrap wavefunctions as they dissipate. The length of time it would take however depends on if the stimuli creates cyclic reactions, where the refiring of neuron clusters continues triggering a similar effect at which point you are no longer dealing with the initial stimuli but a facsimile. (such as hearing a ring after a gunshot etc)
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#3
confused2 Offline
Quote:human brain lives 15 seconds 'in the past'
I can't see this being true. We couldn't drive a car or hold a conver[15 seconds]sation if it were true.
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#4
Syne Offline
They don't really communicate it well, and this has been known for a long time. It sounds like they're just trying to describe how the brain fills in missing information, in real-time, by make assumptions....which could be based on more detailed information taken in 15 seconds ago. Not new, and it seems they muddled the idea to get a more hype-worthy headline...as scientists are wont to do nowadays.
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