Image Processing: All it Takes is 13 Milliseconds

It doesn't take long for the brain to process images. How long exactly would you say? Oh, 13 milliseconds, with 1 millisecond being 0.001 second.

According to a press release from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a team of neuroscientists discovered that the human brain can process whole images in that short of amount of time.

The results show how researchers requested the test subjects to look for a particular type of image, such as "picnic" or "smiling couple" as they viewed a series of six to 12 images, each presented between 13 and 80 milliseconds.

Study authors note that rapid processing speed through the eyes helps alter the gaze to better determine the target.

 "The job of the eyes is not only to get the information into the brain, but to allow the brain to think about it rapidly enough to know what you should look at next," said Marry Potter, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and senior author of the study, via a press release. "So in general we're calibrating our eyes so they move around just as often as possible consistent with understanding what we're seeing."

As a visual stimulus hits the retina, the information flows into the brain where things like color, shape and orientation of an object are processed.

Findings showed that though overall performance declined, subjects continued to perform well as image exposure dropped from 80 milliseconds to 53 millisecond and then 40, 27 and finally, 13.

The study's findings show evidence about how "feedforward processing" may be sufficient for the brain to recognize concepts without having to do further feedback processing.

More information regarding the study can be found via the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.