Perception is Not Only a Matter of Now: Our Past Influences What We See

When observing an object, what we see might not be an accurate representation of its actual size. Instead, our perception might be influenced by previously viewed objects – a large object might make the subsequent one seem bigger than it is, and vice versa for a small object.

This visual bias is linked with early visual-evoked brain activity and is driven by the residual information retained by neural populations in our brain’s basic visual analysis levels. In essence, what we see is an ‘average’ our brain creates between what’s happening before our eyes and what has occurred in the past.