Researchers explored how the visual system played a role in how the human brain made perceptual judgements of the external world.
A study published in PLOS One was led by Professor Tim Meese from the school of optometry at Aston University and Dr Daniel Baker from the department of psychology at the University of York.
‘Our results indicate that human vision can exploit defocus blur to infer perceptual scale but that it does this crudely; more a heuristic than a metrical analysis.
‘Overall, our findings provide new insights into the computational mechanisms used by the human brain in perceptual judgments about the relation between ourselves and the external world,’ Professor Meese explained.
Study participants were shown photographs of real and model railways scenes that had been edited and asked to identify which was the real scene.