People are visual detectives
Tuesday, May 24, 2011 - 12:00
in Psychology & Sociology
The house keys in a kitchen drawer full of mess. Or that one small piece of paper with notes on a table laden with other papers. In a brief glance, in a tenth of a second, people can determine if an object sought is present in a collection of other objects. We can do that because in a flash our brain calculates the probability of the object concerned being found among other things. This is the conclusion of Dutch researcher Ronald van den Berg who published his findings this week in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience.