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Do you really see what you think you see? Guess what?  You don't. Perception experts have long known that we see much less of the world than we think we do, according to newswise.com. A person creates a mental model of their surroundings by stitching together scraps of visual information gleaned while shifting attention from place to place. Counterintuitively, the very process that creates the illusion of a complete picture relies on filtering out most of what's out there. Kind of like focusing on just what's in front of you when you're trying to ignore distractions.   "The visual system really cares about objects," says postdoctoral fellow J. Eric T. Taylor, who is the lead author on the paper reporting this. "If I move around a room, the locations of all the objects - chairs, tables, doors, walls, etc. -- change on my retina, but my mental representation of the room stays the same." Objects play such a fundamental role in how we...

Who hasn't been there?  We see a pretty -- or handsome -- face and we can't look away.  The reason is pretty obvious.  But there's a new one that may take your breath away. It's our brain rewarding us for looking. A quick glimpse of a face provides us with rich information about the person in front of us. Are we acquainted? Man or woman? Happy or angry? Attractive? Research has shown that our visual system is able to direct attention to the most important information in a face. A new study suggests that evolution has made us experts on faces, according to newswise.com. “We are very curious about others’ faces, we read stories in them and evaluate their aesthetic value,” says Olga Chelnokova, writing for her Ph.D thesis at the department of psychology, University of Oslo. Together with colleagues from another research group, she revealed that the brain reward system – a cluster of regions deep in our brain – is involved in our evaluation of other people’s...