You've probably heard of the 'uncanny valley' - the phenomenon where humanlike robots seem creepy. It seems there's something hard-wired in the human brain that lets us easily tell the difference between fake and real objects.
Now, psychologists at UC Berkeley have measured how fast that process happens in our brains - and it's fast. According to their findings, humans are visually wired to reach a snap judgement about what's real and what isn't in as little as a quarter of a second.
Animacy Decisions
“This unique visual mechanism allows us to perceive what’s really alive and what’s simulated in just 250 milliseconds,” said study lead author Allison Yamanashi Leib. “It also guides us to determine the overall level of activity in a scene.”
"Our study shows that participants made animacy decisions without conscious deliberation, and that they agreed on what was lifelike and what was not," added David Whitney, study senior author. "It is surprising that, even without talking about it or deliberating about it together, we immediately share in our impressions of lifelikeness.”
"This suggests that the visual system favors abstract global impressions such as lifelikeness at the expense of the fine details,” Whitney said. “We perceive the forest, and how alive it is, but not the trees.”
The full details of the study were published in Nature Communications.
