More Than Meets the Eye

Many studies suggest that pushing your brain to multitask — writing emails, for instance, while watching the day’s latest news and eating breakfast — leads to poorer performance and lower productivity. But for at least one everyday task — visual sampling (the act of picking up bits of visual information through short glances) — multitasking is not a problem for the brain. A collaboration between researchers at the UC Santa Barbara and the University of Bristol in the UK has shown that during visual sampling, the brain can handle various visual functions simultaneously.

“We might not realize it, but human vision is rather limited,” said Miguel Eckstein, professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at UCSB. “We only see clearly in a small region around our specific focus.” Eckstein’s study, “Foveal analysis and peripheral selection during active visual sampling,” appears in the early Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Plus edition.

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Enhancing Cognition with Video Games: A Multiple Game Training Study

Background

Previous evidence points to a causal link between playing action video games and enhanced cognition and perception. However, benefits of playing other video games are under-investigated. We examined whether playing non-action games also improves cognition. Hence, we compared transfer effects of an action and other non-action types that required different cognitive demands.

Methodology/Principal Findings

We instructed 5 groups of non-gamer participants to play one game each on a mobile device (iPhone/iPod Touch) for one hour a day/five days a week over four weeks (20 hours). Games included action, spatial memory, match-3, hidden- object, and an agent-based life simulation. Participants performed four behavioral tasks before and after video game training to assess for transfer effects. Tasks included an attentional blink task, a spatial memory and visual search dual task, a visual filter memory task to assess for multiple object tracking and cognitive control, as well as a complex verbal span task. Action game playing eliminated attentional blink and improved cognitive control and multiple-object tracking. Match-3, spatial memory and hidden object games improved visual search performance while the latter two also improved spatial working memory. Complex verbal span improved after match-3 and action game training.

Conclusion/Significance

Cognitive improvements were not limited to action game training alone and different games enhanced different aspects of cognition. We conclude that training specific cognitive abilities frequently in a video game improves performance in tasks that share common underlying demands. Overall, these results suggest that many video game-related cognitive improvements may not be due to training of general broad cognitive systems such as executive attentional control, but instead due to frequent utilization of specific cognitive processes during game play. Thus, many video game training related improvements to cognition may be attributed to near-transfer effects.

More Than Just Looking – A Role of Tiny Eye Movements Explained

Tübingen researcher learns how the brain keeps an eye on the periphery even when focusing on one object.

Have you ever wondered whether it’s possible to look at two places at once? Because our eyes have a specialized central region with high visual acuity and good color vision, we must always focus on one spot at a time in order to see our environment. As a result, our eyes constantly jump back and forth as we look around.

But what if – when you are looking at an object – your brain also allowed you to “look” somewhere else at the same time, out of the corner of your eye, as it were? Now, a scientist at the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN), which is funded by the German Excellence initiative at Tübingen University, has found a possible explanation for how this might happen.

Ziad Hafed, the leader of the Physiology of Active Vision Junior Research Group at CIN, wondered about the role of a type of tiny microscopic eye movement that occurs when we fix our gaze on something, called a microsaccade. “Microsaccades are sort of enigmatic,” Hafed says. They are movements of the eye which occur at exactly the moment when we are trying to look at something steadily – i.e., when we are trying to prevent our eyes from moving.

It was long thought that microsaccades were nothing but random, inconsequential tics, but Hafed wondered whether the mere unconscious preparation to generate these tiny eye movements can alter visual perception and effectively allow you to “see” out of the corner of your eye. He found that before generating a microsaccade, the brain reorganizes its visual processing to alter how you perceive things. “Imagine that you are the coach of a football team,” Hafed says. “You would normally ask your defenders to spread out across the field in order to provide good coverage during match play. However, in preparation for an upcoming corner kick by your opposing team, you would reorganize your defenders, assigning two of them to become temporary goalkeepers and protect the goal. What I found was evidence for a similar strategy in the visual brain before microsaccades,” says Hafed. That is, in preparation for generating a tiny microscopic eye movement, the brain – the “coach” – causes a subtle reorganization of the visual system, and thus alters how you might see out of the corner of your eyes (see diagram).

Using a series of experiments on human participants, coupled with computational modeling of the human visual system, Hafed asked participants to fix their attention on a spot that appeared on a screen in front of them, while he carefully measured their tiny microscopic eye movements. Hafed then probed the participants’ ability to look at two places at once by testing their peripheral vision. He found that in preparation to generate a tiny microsaccade, the participants demonstrated remarkable changes in their ability to process visual inputs. In the periphery, tiny microscopic eye movements effectively improved the capacity to direct visual input – from around where gaze is fixed – towards the brain. Hafed’s results, which are described in the leading science journal Neuron, thus demonstrate an important functional role for these tiny, microscopic, and “enigmatic” movements of the eye in helping us to perceive our environment.

Hafed’s results not only help us understand a previously puzzling phenomenon; there are also potentially wide-ranging applications arising from this work. In particular, this work can affect how we design computer and machine user interfaces. For example, using knowledge about the whole range of eye movements we constantly make, including microscopic ones, our future “smart user interfaces” can ensure that things likely to attract our attention are not displayed in places where they can be distracting. Conversely, if we need to locate something that should attract our attention – a warning light in a control room, for instance – this same approach will also be useful. As Hafed put it, “eye movements would essentially be a window on our minds.”

Brain discovery sheds light on link between vision and emotion

Neuroscientists have discovered a new area of the brain that is uniquely specialised for peripheral vision and could be targeted in future treatments for panic disorders and Alzheimer’s disease.

Published today in high impact journal Current Biology, researchers led by Dr Hsin-Hao Yu and Professor Marcello Rosa from Monash University’s Department of Physiology found that a brain area, known as prostriata, was specialised in detecting fast-moving objects in peripheral vision.

This area, located in a primitive part of the cerebral cortex, has characteristics unlike any other visual area described before, including a “direct line” of communication to brain areas controlling emotion and quick reactions.

Dr Yu said the discovery, identified during the development of the Monash Vision Group’s bionic eye, funded through the ARC Research in Bionic Vision Science and Technology Initiative, could lead to new treatments for panic disorders such as agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) and may extend into other medical areas including Alzheimer’s treatment.

“The brain is the most complex organ in the human body and perhaps the most remarkable. These findings change how we think of the brain in terms of how visual information is processed,” Dr Yu said.

“This area is likely to be hyperactive in panic disorder, with agoraphobia. This knowledge could lead to treatment options for the hyperactivity, and therefore sensitivity to such disorders, particularly the fear of open spaces.

“Correlation with previous studies also shows that prostriata is one of the first areas affected in Alzheimer’s disease. This knowledge helps to explain spatial disorientation and the tendency to fall, which are among the earliest signs of a problem associated with Alzheimer’s.”

Professor Rosa said this area had ultra-fast responses to visual stimuli, simultaneously broadcasting information to brain areas that control attention, emotional and motor reactions. This challenges current conceptions of how the brain processes visual information.

“This suggests a specialised brain circuit through which stimuli in peripheral vision can be fast-tracked to command quickly coordinated physical and emotional responses,” Professor Rosa said.