How New Artificial Intelligence Can Help Us Understand How We See

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From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 15, 2009) — Queen Mary scientists have, for the first time, used computer artificial intelligence to create previously unseen types of pictures to explore the abilities of the human visual system.

Writing in the journal Vision Research, Professor Peter McOwan, and Milan Verma from Queen Mary's School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science report the first published use of an artificial intelligence computer program to create pictures and stimuli to use in visual search experiments.

They found that when it comes to searching for a target in pictures, we don't have two special mechanisms in the brain - one for easy searches and one for hard - as has been previously suggested; but rather a single brain mechanism that just finds it harder to complete the task as it becomes more difficult.

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