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The researchers from the University of California Berkeley studied the brain's "continuity field," a function of perception where the brain uses what is seen to create a sense of visual stability, according to an announcement from the university on Wednesday, Jan. 12.
According to study lead author Mauro Manassi, who is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Aberdeen and former postdoctoral fellow in Whitney’s lab at UC Berkeley, “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."
About 100 people participated in the study and watched videos of closeups of faces morphing in a 30-second time-lapse.
After watching the video, participants were asked to identify the face they saw, and "almost consistently" chose a frame from halfway through the video, rather than the final one, the report said.
“One could say our brain is procrastinating,” said David Whitney, a UC Berkeley professor and study senior author. “It’s too much work to constantly update images, so it sticks to the past because the past is a good predictor of the present. We recycle information from the past because it’s faster, more efficient and less work.”
Read the full report here.
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