Prior Experience Alters the Appearance of Blurry Object Borders

Partial blindness: Visual experience is not rich, but not sparse

Is our perceptual experience constrained by an information bottleneck (i.e., the limited capacity for cognitive access), and if so, how? To answer these questions, we investigated observers' perceptual resolution for an individual face when they saw either a single face or multiple faces simultaneously. We characterized perceptual resolution by measuring how accurately observers detected the degradation of a face. In two experiments, we found that the resolution of perception decreased when seeing multiple faces compared to when seeing a single face, which mainly resulted from the neglect of degradation. Importantly, this degradation neglect was based on partial blindness rather than complete blindness to a face, indicating that perceptual experience is limited by an information bottleneck as a form of partial blindness to an individual item. Together, our findings suggest that perceptual experience at a glance might be sparser than retinal resolution or perceptual resolution measured under conditions where the target stimulus is the sole focus of attention; however, it might be richer than a small handful of items.

Hi-def memories of lo-def scenes

The study of visual memory is typically concerned with an image's content: How well, and with what precision, we can recall which objects, people, or features we have seen in the past. But images also vary in their quality: The same object or scene may appear in an image that is sharp and highly resolved, or it may appear in an image that is blurry and faded. How do we remember those properties? Here six experiments demonstrate a new phenomenon of "vividness extension": a tendency to (mis)remember images as though they are "enhanced" versions of themselves - that is, sharper and higher quality than they actually appeared at the time of encoding. Subjects briefly saw images of scenes that varied in how blurry they were, and then adjusted a new image to be as blurry as the original. Unlike an old photograph that fades and blurs, subjects misremembered scenes as more vivid (i.e., less blurry) than those scenes had actually appeared moments earlier. Follow-up experiments extended this phenomenon to saturation and pixelation - with subjects recalling scenes as more colorful and resolved - and ruled out various forms of response bias. We suggest that memory misrepresents the quality of what we have seen, such that the world is remembered as more vivid than it is.