The visual cortex suppresses redundant information and saves energy by frequently forwarding image differences similar to methods used for video data compression.

we have now demonstrated that the visual cortex suppresses redundant information and saves energy by frequently forwarding image differences

2015-03-13: That’s clever visual cortex hacking.

“These GIFs use depth of field and graphic elements to achieve their effect, just like many classic paintings. The white lines define the plane where the screen is, creating a mental division between background, midplane and foreground. Combined with the camera’s depth of field blur, it tricks our brain into thinking that things are popping out of the screen.”

2022-02-18: Visual Stability

Despite a noisy and ever-changing visual world, our perceptual experience seems remarkably stable over time. How does our visual system achieve this apparent stability? Here, we introduce a previously unknown visual illusion that shows direct evidence for an online mechanism continuously smoothing our percepts over time. As a result, a continuously seen physically changing object can be misperceived as unchanging. We find that online object appearance is captured by past visual experience up to 15 seconds ago. We propose that, because of an underlying active mechanism of serial dependence, the representation of the object is continuously merged over time, and the consequence is an illusory stability in which object appearance is biased toward the past. Our results provide a direct demonstration of the link between serial dependence in visual representations and perceived visual stability in everyday life.