On the Move - Cognitive Science
How do we capture movement? Just like in the movies, the feeling of movement is created by the motion-processing system, which automatically fuses, for instance, the images of legs that shift position slightly from frame to frame into the appearance of a walking actor. So the motion system must match up image elements from frame to frame, over space and time.
Despite our amazing ability to recognize moving shapes, our perception of movement falls within certain thresholds. Movement which is either too fast of too slow is not detectable. At one extreme we are unable to see a bullet fired from a gun. At the other we are unable to detect the motion of an hour hand going around a clock face.
The ability to perceive motion is a property of the visual system, but can be isolated from visual perception. There are patients who can see only moving objects, while other patients can see every object but can’t see motion. Just imagine how it must feel to see objects jumping from location to location in space without seeing them moving!
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Written by Chen Rosner Or-Bach, (MA) Cognitive Psychology – Chen is a cognitive psychologist at Mind360, a leading scientific brain training games developer for boosting your memory, attention, executive functions, reasoning, and other key cognitive skills.
