Dec 19, 2020 01:31 AM
New study: Visual illusion that may help explain consciousness
https://theconversation.com/visual-illus...udy-151864
INTRO: How much are you conscious of right now? Are you conscious of just the words in the centre of your visual field or all the words surrounding it? We tend to assume that our visual consciousness gives us a rich and detailed picture of the entire scene in front of us. The truth is very different, as our discovery of a visual illusion, published in Psychological Science, shows.
To illustrate how limited the information in our visual field is, get a deck of playing cards. Pick a spot on the wall in front of you and stare at it. Then take a card at random. Without looking at its front, hold it far out to your left with a straight arm, until it’s on the very edge of your visual field. Keep staring at the point on the wall and flip the card round so it’s facing you.
Try to guess its colour. You will probably find it extremely difficult. Now slowly move the card closer to the centre of your vision, while keeping your arm straight. Pay close attention to the point at which you can identify its colour.
It’s amazing how central the card needs to be before you’re able to do this, let alone identify its suit or value. What this little experiment shows is how undetailed (and often inaccurate) our conscious vision is, especially outside the centre of our visual field.
Here is another example that brings us a little closer to how these phenomena are investigated scientifically... (MORE - details)
The Remarkable Ways Our Brains Slip Into Synchrony
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-r...synchrony/
EXCERPTS: For instance, you and a friend might be pointing at a map, and talking about it together. Or you might be watching a television show together and sharing observations about it. Or maybe you can recall the first name of a celebrity and your spouse remembers the last name for you. Does that object (or event) out there in the environment belong to your cognition or to the other person’s?
This fluid back-and-forth sharing of information between you and other people is often so dense that it can be difficult to safely treat you and them as separate systems. If a tool that enhances your capabilities can become an extension of “who you are,” what about another person who enhances your capabilities? The information that makes you who you are includes not just the information carried inside your brain, body, and nearby objects but also the information carried by the people around you.
In fact, many of our most influential experiences - team projects, community events, holiday meals - are shared with, and partly shaped by, other people. Whether you’re having a conversation with someone, attending a lecture, coordinating on a project at work, watching TV, or just reading a book, it usually involves information that is being shared among two or more people. There’s an old Spanish proverb that goes, “Dime con quien andas y te diré quien eres”: Tell me with whom you walk, and I’ll tell you who you are.
A growing body of cognitive science research is showing that when two people cooperate on a shared task, their individual actions get coordinated in a way that is remarkably similar to how one person’s limbs get coordinated when he or she performs a solitary task. [...] Evidently, neural connections are not the only thing that can provide the sharing of information that synchronizes two different subsystems. Your own action-perception cycle can share information back and forth with someone else’s action-perception cycle, in a manner that makes the two of you synchronize and behave a little bit like one system.
[...] This physical and mental coordination is even more impressive when the two people are simultaneously present with each other and contributing equally to the conversation. With the help of Natasha Kirkham, Richardson and Dale expanded their eye-tracking experiment to work with two people in an unscripted dialogue. They put two eye-tracking machines in two separate rooms and had two people view the same painting while talking with each other over headsets.
[...] Imagine being in this experiment. You’re alone in a room looking at a picture, but you get to talk to someone else on your headset who is in another room and looking at the same picture. It’s a bit like calling up a friend on the phone and watching a live sports game on TV together, like my buddy Steve and I do. While their eye movements were being recorded, these experiment participants talked about the painting that they were both looking at. When you analyze the transcript of the conversation, you see numerous interruptions and completions of each other’s sentences, because an important part of how we understand what a person is saying is by anticipating what’s coming next out of their mouth.
Importantly, since the two people in the conversation were anticipating each other’s words and thoughts so closely, that 1.5-second lag in the correlation between eye movements disappeared. People were looking at the same parts of the same image at the same time. Their eye movements had slipped into genuine synchrony, not unlike Kelso’s waggling fingers and Schmidt’s swinging legs.
When two brains get correlated by a shared conversation, it’s not just the brains and eyes that produce coordinated behavior. It’s the hands, the heads, and the spines, too. The two bodies get coordinated in ways in which they weren’t coordinated before the conversation began... (MORE - details)
https://theconversation.com/visual-illus...udy-151864
INTRO: How much are you conscious of right now? Are you conscious of just the words in the centre of your visual field or all the words surrounding it? We tend to assume that our visual consciousness gives us a rich and detailed picture of the entire scene in front of us. The truth is very different, as our discovery of a visual illusion, published in Psychological Science, shows.
To illustrate how limited the information in our visual field is, get a deck of playing cards. Pick a spot on the wall in front of you and stare at it. Then take a card at random. Without looking at its front, hold it far out to your left with a straight arm, until it’s on the very edge of your visual field. Keep staring at the point on the wall and flip the card round so it’s facing you.
Try to guess its colour. You will probably find it extremely difficult. Now slowly move the card closer to the centre of your vision, while keeping your arm straight. Pay close attention to the point at which you can identify its colour.
It’s amazing how central the card needs to be before you’re able to do this, let alone identify its suit or value. What this little experiment shows is how undetailed (and often inaccurate) our conscious vision is, especially outside the centre of our visual field.
Here is another example that brings us a little closer to how these phenomena are investigated scientifically... (MORE - details)
The Remarkable Ways Our Brains Slip Into Synchrony
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-r...synchrony/
EXCERPTS: For instance, you and a friend might be pointing at a map, and talking about it together. Or you might be watching a television show together and sharing observations about it. Or maybe you can recall the first name of a celebrity and your spouse remembers the last name for you. Does that object (or event) out there in the environment belong to your cognition or to the other person’s?
This fluid back-and-forth sharing of information between you and other people is often so dense that it can be difficult to safely treat you and them as separate systems. If a tool that enhances your capabilities can become an extension of “who you are,” what about another person who enhances your capabilities? The information that makes you who you are includes not just the information carried inside your brain, body, and nearby objects but also the information carried by the people around you.
In fact, many of our most influential experiences - team projects, community events, holiday meals - are shared with, and partly shaped by, other people. Whether you’re having a conversation with someone, attending a lecture, coordinating on a project at work, watching TV, or just reading a book, it usually involves information that is being shared among two or more people. There’s an old Spanish proverb that goes, “Dime con quien andas y te diré quien eres”: Tell me with whom you walk, and I’ll tell you who you are.
A growing body of cognitive science research is showing that when two people cooperate on a shared task, their individual actions get coordinated in a way that is remarkably similar to how one person’s limbs get coordinated when he or she performs a solitary task. [...] Evidently, neural connections are not the only thing that can provide the sharing of information that synchronizes two different subsystems. Your own action-perception cycle can share information back and forth with someone else’s action-perception cycle, in a manner that makes the two of you synchronize and behave a little bit like one system.
[...] This physical and mental coordination is even more impressive when the two people are simultaneously present with each other and contributing equally to the conversation. With the help of Natasha Kirkham, Richardson and Dale expanded their eye-tracking experiment to work with two people in an unscripted dialogue. They put two eye-tracking machines in two separate rooms and had two people view the same painting while talking with each other over headsets.
[...] Imagine being in this experiment. You’re alone in a room looking at a picture, but you get to talk to someone else on your headset who is in another room and looking at the same picture. It’s a bit like calling up a friend on the phone and watching a live sports game on TV together, like my buddy Steve and I do. While their eye movements were being recorded, these experiment participants talked about the painting that they were both looking at. When you analyze the transcript of the conversation, you see numerous interruptions and completions of each other’s sentences, because an important part of how we understand what a person is saying is by anticipating what’s coming next out of their mouth.
Importantly, since the two people in the conversation were anticipating each other’s words and thoughts so closely, that 1.5-second lag in the correlation between eye movements disappeared. People were looking at the same parts of the same image at the same time. Their eye movements had slipped into genuine synchrony, not unlike Kelso’s waggling fingers and Schmidt’s swinging legs.
When two brains get correlated by a shared conversation, it’s not just the brains and eyes that produce coordinated behavior. It’s the hands, the heads, and the spines, too. The two bodies get coordinated in ways in which they weren’t coordinated before the conversation began... (MORE - details)
