![]() “They centre on different places,” DeLong says. If you’re sitting still and watching things in front of you moving about, it’s a very different signal to the view you get when you’re walking along. The specificity relates to the way that we perceive different types of motion. “They have to be very specific and special, but you could see an artefact at 500 fps if you wanted to,” DeLong tells me. It’s a little like the relationship between shutter-speed and aperture in a camera: by letting lots of light in with a wide aperture and setting a short shutter-speed your photograph will be equally well-exposed as one taken by letting a small amount of light with a narrow aperture and setting a long shutter-speed.īut while we have trouble distinguishing the intensity of flashes of light less than 10ms, we can perceive incredibly quick motion artefacts. “In general, people can’t distinguish between short, bright and long, dim stimuli within a tenth of a second duration,” he says. You can have a nanosecond of incredibly bright light and it will appear the same as a tenth of a second of dim light. It says that there’s a trade-off between intensity and duration in a flash of light lasting less than 100ms. “Basically, it’s one of the few laws in perception,” Professor Thomas Busey, associate department chair at Indiana University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, tells me. (opens in new tab)Īs an example, there’s this thing called Bloch's law (opens in new tab). That’s because games output moving images, and therefore invoke different visual systems to the ones that simply process light.Ī classic set of photos used in discussions of persistence of vision. ![]() And if you’ve heard about studies on fighter pilots in which they’ve demonstrated an ability to perceive an image flashed on the screen for 1/250th of a second, that’s also not quite what perception of smooth, flowing computer game imagery is about. Some people can detect a slight flicker in a 60 Hz fluorescent lightbulb, and most people will see flickery smears across their vision if they make a rapid eye movement when looking at the modulated LED tail lights found in many modern cars.īut this only offers part of the puzzle when it comes to perceiving flowing smooth game footage. Most people perceive a flickering light source as steady illumination at a rate of 50 to 60 times a second, or hertz. The first thing to think about is flicker frequency. So before you get mad about researchers talking about what framerates you can and can't perceive, pat yourself on the back: if you play action-heavy games, you're likely more perceptive of framerates than the average person. ![]() So good, in fact, that games are being used in visual therapies. “ unique, one of the only ways to massively increase almost all aspects of your vision, so contrast sensitivity, attention abilities and multiple object tracking,” Adrien Chopin, a post-doc researcher in cognitive sciences, tells me. That’s because visual perception can be trained, and action games are particularly good at training vision. “If you’re working with gamers, you’re working with a really weird population of people who are probably operating close to maximal levels,” says DeLong. ![]() Computer game players have some of the best eyes around. Assistant professor Jordan DeLongĪnd finally, we’re special. a really weird population of people who are probably operating close to maximal levels. Your brain’s actually way more accurate than one individual part of it.” “We can actually perceive things, like the width of a line or two lines aligning, smaller than what an individual neuron can do, and that’s because we’re averaging over thousands and thousands of neurons. DeLong is assistant professor of psychology at St Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, and the majority of his research is on visual systems. “You can’t predict the behaviour of the whole system based on one cell, or one neuron,” Jordan DeLong tells me. This point is fundamental to understanding our perception of vision. Yet another important concept: the whole of what we perceive is greater than what any one element of our visual system can achieve.
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