When you see a bag of carrots at the grocery store, does your mind go to potatoes and parsnips or buffalo wings and celery? It depends, of course, on whether you're making a hearty winter stew or ...

By activating the visual cortex electrically, those modules generate simple spots or patterns of light that the brain can try ...

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 ...

In a massive scientific effort, hundreds of researchers have helped to map the connections between hundreds of thousands of neurons in the mouse brain and then overlayed their firing patterns in ...

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 ...

Brains constantly predict what the eyes will see next, relying on internal feedback networks that physically rewire ...

A research group led by Prof. Zhang Peng from the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has revealed how the human brain resolves perceptual conflicts and generates conscious ...

Visual perception emerges from a cascade of neural transformations that begin with photoreceptors in the retina and proceed via the lateral geniculate nucleus to primary visual cortex (V1), thereafter ...

Already in the 1960s, Hubel and Wiesel proposed a model according to which visual perception is the result of orderly, stepwise computations in the brain – with specialized neurons in the cortex ...

Vision shapes behavior and, a new study by MIT neuroscientists finds, behavior and internal states shape vision. The research, published Nov. 25 in Neuron, finds in mice that via specific circuits, ...

I llusions are everywhere. For example, the moon appears larger when it rests on the horizon than when it is hanging in the sky. Other visual tricks occur when a person perceives an object in an image ...