After exposure, study co-author David Corney presented the program with a set of images that are optical illusions to the human eye.
Optical illusions are images that trick the viewer into seeing something different from what exists in reality.
One simple illusion presented to the software is "simultaneous brightness contrast," involving pictures of two identically shaded tiles.
When the tiles are placed against contrasting shades of gray, a person will see the tile on the dark background as lighter than the tile on the lighter background.
The lab's software program misjudged reflective ability just like humans would: Tiles that would look brighter than they were to us were depicted brighter than they really were by the artificial nerve network, Corney said.
Based on its earlier experience with other images, "the network assumed that the object on the dark background is more likely to be in shadow than the one on the light background," Lotto said.
The study was recently published in the Public Library of Science's journal Computational Biology.
Artificial Fools
For the researchers, this finding suggests that optical illusions aren't unique to humans.
That's a "radical departure from the approach to vision taken in the last 50 years," said Dale Purves, director of Duke University's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He was not involved in this research, but Purves was a co-author with Lotto on a book about perception.
"Most vision scientists have been glued to the idea that to understand perception you must understand the properties of the cells individually," Purves said.
In this theory, our photo receptors evolved over time to fine-tune our vision.
By contrast, Lotto's research suggests all visual distinctions aren't hardwired but rather represent the statistical accumulation of an individual's earlier experience.
In that sense, over time, a living creature's brain understands images in terms of their usefulness or danger.
"When the brain looks out to the world, it doesn't see the absolute of things. It sees relationships and uses relationships to build context," Lotto said.
Take-Home Lessons
The research can benefit the robotic realm, Lotto said. For instance, designers need to consider that their industrial workplace robots might be confused by what they see.
For humans, there are lessons as well.
"Time is short, and for many of us, we have the luxury to decide how we want to spend what few conscious hours we have," Lotto said.
For example, watching television will cause us to perceive the world in one way, while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or swimming with dolphins may allow us to understand the world more deeply, Lotto added.
"How we spend those hours will shape our perceptual and conceptual truths in the future," he said, "not just as individuals but also as a society."
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