Every illusion has a backstage crew. New research shows the brain’s own “puppet strings”—special neurons that quietly tug our perception—help us see edges and shapes that don’t actually exist. When ...

Understanding how the human brain represents the information picked up by the senses is a longstanding objective of neuroscience and psychology studies. Most past studies focusing on the visual cortex ...

Vision shapes behavior and, a new study by MIT neuroscientists finds, behavior and internal states shape vision. The research, published Nov. 25 in Neuron, finds in mice that via specific circuits, ...

Neuroscientists reveal that the part of the brain that receives and processes visual information in sighted people develops a unique connectivity pattern in people born blind. They say this pattern in ...

Neuroscientists want to understand how individual neurons encode information that allows us to distinguish objects, like telling a leaf apart from a rock. But they have struggled to build ...

Our brains begin to create internal representations of the world around us from the first moment we open our eyes. We perceptually assemble components of scenes into recognizable objects thanks to ...

I llusions are everywhere. For example, the moon appears larger when it rests on the horizon than when it is hanging in the sky. Other visual tricks occur when a person perceives an object in an image ...

Whether we're staring at our phones, the page of a book, or the person across the table, the objects of our focus never stand in isolation; there are always other objects or people in our field of ...