Motion-Induced Blindness

Posted 13 Jun 2001 at 23:24 UTC by steve

A new article in Nature describes current research into motion-induced blindness. MIB is believed to occur because the right hemisphere of our brain appears to see the world exactly as our raw sensory data shows it. But the left hemisphere tries to suppress sensory information that conflicts with our internal model of how the world should appear. The Nature article includes a simple animation, called Bonneh's Illusion, that demonstrates the effect. A more detailed discussion and further examples of the phenomenon can be found on Yoram Bonneh's MIB page and Jack Pettigrew's web page. A better understanding of MIB and right-left brain interactions could have applications to binocular or stereoscopic vision systems in robots.

**useful to binocular vision?**, posted 14 Jun 2001 at 19:03 UTC by Maxim » (Apprentice)

I don't see why interactions between raw and interpreted sensor data or MIB are more related to binocular vision systems rather than to monocular ones. The MIB is observed even with a single eye, I bet.

Good point, posted 14 Jun 2001 at 21:45 UTC by steve » (Master)

Yep, I just tried looking at the Bonneh's Illusion animation with one eye shut and still experience MIB. Oddly, MID occurs (for me at least) very frequently using only my right eye but almost not at all using only my left eye. I wonder if that's related to a right/left brain thing or just because of differences in my eyes.

monocular MIB, posted 15 Jun 2001 at 00:35 UTC by Maxim » (Apprentice)

Well, although I wasn't able to reproduce this difference of MIB for left and right eye (it turned out to be difficult for me to observe MIB at all), one could speculate about the nature of the disbalance. Since the visual cortex corresponding to the right eye is in the left hemisphere, which is incidentally blamed to be the one responsible for supressing inconsistent data, there could be better chances to supress the signal originated from the left visual cortex before it gets propagated anywhere else.