Using a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it experiment, researchers at Trinity College Dublin have found that individuals differ widely in the speed at which they perceive visual cues. Some people perceive a rapidly changing visual signal at frequencies that others cannot, meaning that some access more visual information per period of time than others.
This discovery suggests that some people have an innate advantage in certain environments where response time is crucial, such as in ball sports or competitive games.
The frequency with which we perceive the world is known as our “temporal resolution” and in many ways is similar to the refresh rate of a computer monitor.
The researchers, from the Department of Zoology in the Faculty of Natural Sciences and the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College, found that there is considerable variation between people in their temporal resolution, meaning that some people actually see more “images per second.” what others.
To quantify this, the scientists used the “critical flicker fusion threshold,” a measure of the maximum frequency at which an individual can perceive a flickering light source.
If the light source flickers above a person’s threshold, they will not be able to see that it is flashing and will instead see the light as steady. Some participants in the experiment indicated that they saw the light completely still when it was actually flashing about 35 times per second, while others could still perceive the light flashing at speeds of more than 60 times per second.
Clinton Haarlem, a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Natural Sciences, is the first author of the paper that has just been published in the leading journal PLOS ONE. He said: “We also measured temporal resolution on multiple occasions in the same participants and found that, although there is significant variation between individuals, the trait appears to be quite stable over time. inside individuals.”
Although our visual temporal resolution is fairly stable from day to day overall, a post hoc analysis suggested that there may be slightly more variation over time among women than among men.
“We don’t yet know how this variation in visual temporal resolution might affect our daily lives, but we think that individual differences in perceptual speed might become evident in high-speed situations where one might need to locate or track quickly.” “moving objects, such as in ball sports, or in situations where visual scenes change rapidly, such as in competitive games,” Clinton Haarlem added.
“This suggests that some people may have an advantage over others before they even pick up a racket and hit a tennis ball, or pick up a controller and jump into some online fantasy world.”
Andrew Jackson, Professor of Zoology in Trinity’s School of Natural Sciences, said: “What I think is really interesting about this project is how a zoologist, a geneticist and a psychologist can find different angles to this work. For me, as zoologist, “The consequences of variation in visual perception likely have profound implications for how predators and prey interact, with several existing arms races to invest in the brain’s processing power and clever strategies to exploit enemy weaknesses.”
Kevin Mitchell, associate professor of Developmental Neurobiology at Trinity’s School of Genetics and Microbiology and the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College, said: “Because we only have access to our own subjective experience, we might naively expect everyone else to perceive the world in the same way. the same way we do it. Examples like color blindness show that that’s not always true, but there are many lesser-known ways in which perception can vary as well. This study characterizes one of those differences: in the “frame rate” of our visual systems. . “Some people really seem to see the world faster than others.”