MEDICAL PRESS
Researcher Dobromir Rahnev demonstrates the application of temporary magnetic stimulation in a Georgia Tech psychology research center with graduate student Ji-Won Jung. This type of stimulation was used at the University of California, Berkeley for experiments on the frontal cortex’s role in creating vision. PHOTO/Rob Felt, Georgia Tech
A sportscaster lunges forward. “Interception! Drew Brees threw the ball right into the opposing linebacker’s hands! Like he didn’t even see him!”
The quarterback likely actually did not see the defender standing right in front of him, said Dobromir Rahnev, a psychologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Rahnev leads a research team making new discoveries about how the brain organizes visual perception, including how it leaves things out even when they’re plainly in sight.
Rahnev and researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have come up with a rough map of the frontal cortex’s role in controlling vision. They published their findings on Monday, May 9, 2016 in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Thinking cap
The frontal cortex is often seen as our “thinking cap,” the part of the brain scientists associate with thinking and making decisions. But it’s not commonly connected with vision. “Some people believe that the frontal cortex is not involved,” said Rahnev, an assistant professor at the School of Psychology. The new research adds to previous evidence that it is, he said.
The lack of association with that part of the brain may have to do with the fact it’s other parts that transform information coming from the eyes into sight and others still that make sense of it by doing things like identifying objects in it.
But the thinking cap of the brain controls and oversees this whole process, making it as essential to how we see as those other areas, Rahnev said. How that works also accounts for why we sometimes miss things right in front of us.
A camera it’s not
“We feel that our vision is like a camera, but that is utterly wrong,” Rahnev said. “Our brains aren’t just seeing, they’re actively constructing the visual scene and making decisions about it.” Sometimes the frontal cortex isn’t expecting to see something, so although it’s in plain sight, it blots it out of consciousness.
To test out the fontal cortex’s involvement in vision, the researchers ran a two-part experiment.
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