“Illusions are fun, but they are also a gateway to perception,” says Hyeyoung Shin, assistant professor of neuroscience at Seoul National University. Shin is the first author of a new study in Nature ...

A single clear image can rewire the visual brain, making later recognition faster without relying on memory systems.

Our survival depends upon our ability to observe the world around us accurately and reliably. Disturbances in visual perception occur in a range of psychiatric and neurodevelopmental diseases, ...

Learn how our brains store images that help us achieve flashes of insight when looking at seemingly incomprehensible visual tests.

An illusion is when we see and perceive an object that doesn't match the sensory input that reaches our eyes. In the case of the image below, the sensory input is four Pac Man–like black figures. But ...

Every illusion has a backstage crew. New research shows the brain’s own “puppet strings”—special neurons that quietly tug our perception—help us see edges and shapes that don’t actually exist. When ...

Our brains begin to create internal representations of the world around us from the first moment we open our eyes. We perceptually assemble components of scenes into recognizable objects thanks to ...

For more than 50 years, it has been known that in the cerebral cortex of many mammals, neurons with the same function are grouped into columns. Now, for the first time, researchers at the Max Planck ...

The human visual system excels in interpreting complex visual scenes, with symmetry perception playing a pivotal role in organising sensory input into coherent representations. Visual symmetry ...

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Bilal Haider, Georgia Institute of Technology (THE CONVERSATION) Despite the nursery ...