Using a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it experiment, researchers from Trinity College Dublin have discovered that individuals differ widely in the speed at which they perceive visual signals. Some people perceive a rapidly changing visual cue at frequencies that others cannot, which implies some access more visual information per timeframe than others.
This discovery suggests some people have an innate advantage in certain settings where response time is crucial, resembling in ball sports, or in competitive gaming.
The speed with which we perceive the world is referred to as our “temporal resolution,” and in some ways it is analogous to the refresh rate of a pc monitor.
The researchers, from the Department of Zoology within the School of Natural Sciences and the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, found that there may be considerable variation amongst people of their temporal resolution, meaning some people effectively see more “images per second” than others.
To quantify this, the scientists used the “critical flicker fusion threshold,” a measure for the utmost frequency at which a person can perceive a flickering light source.
If the sunshine source flickers above an individual’s threshold, they’ll not give you the option to see that it’s flickering, and as a substitute see the sunshine as regular. Some participants within the experiment indicated they saw the sunshine as completely still when it was in truth flashing about 35 times per second, while others were still in a position to perceive the flashing at rates of over 60 times per second.
Clinton Haarlem, PhD Candidate within the School of Natural Sciences, is the primary creator of the article that has just been published in leading journal PLOS ONE. He said: “We also measured temporal resolution on multiple occasions in the identical participants and located that despite the fact that there is critical variation amongst individuals, the trait appears to be quite stable over time inside individuals.”
Though our visual temporal resolution is sort of stable from each day generally, a post-hoc evaluation did suggest that there could also be barely more variation over time inside females than inside males.
“We do not yet know the way this variation in visual temporal resolution might affect our day-to-day lives, but we consider that individual differences in perception speed might turn out to be apparent in high-speed situations where one might have to locate or track fast-moving objects, resembling in ball sports, or in situations where visual scenes change rapidly, resembling in competitive gaming,” added Clinton Haarlem.
“This implies that some people can have a bonus over others before they’ve even picked up a racquet and hit a tennis ball, or grabbed a controller and jumped into some fantasy world online.”
Andrew Jackson, Professor in Zoology in Trinity’s School of Natural Sciences, said: “What I believe is actually interesting about this project is how a zoologist, a geneticist and a psychologist can all find different angles to this work. For me as a zoologist the results of variation in visual perception likely has profound implications for the way predators and prey interact, with various arms-races existing for investment in brain processing power and clever strategies to use weaknesses in a single’s enemy.”
Kevin Mitchell, Associate Professor in Developmental Neurobiology in Trinity’s School of Genetics and Microbiology, and the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, said: “Because we only have access to our own subjective experience, we’d naively expect that everybody else perceives the world in the identical way we do. Examples like color blindness show that won’t at all times true, but there are a lot of less well-known ways in which perception can vary too. This study characterises one such difference — within the ‘frame rate”‘ of our visual systems. Some people really do appear to see the world faster than others.”
