Latest news with #perception
CNA
a day ago
- CNA
Fears over how Americans are perceived abroad dampen US travel enthusiasm
The summer travel season is in full swing – usually a time for carefree relaxation. But there are signs that travellers from the United States are packing something else in their luggage this year – anxiety about how they will be perceived abroad. According to a recent survey by risk management firm Global Rescue, 72 per cent of experienced American travellers believe they will be viewed more negatively this summer … due to policies coming from the White House. Toni Waterman reports.
New York Times
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How Two Neuroscientists View Optical Illusions
Take a look at this video of a waiting room. Do you see anything strange? Perhaps you saw the rug disappear, or the couch pillows transform, or a few ceiling panels evaporate. Or maybe you didn't. In fact, dozens of objects change in this video, which won second place in the Best Illusion of the Year Contest in 2021. Voting for the latest version of the contest opened on Monday. Illusions 'are the phenomena in which the physical reality is divorced from perception,' said Stephen Macknik, a neuroscientist at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn. He runs the contest with his colleague and spouse, Susana Martinez-Conde. By studying the disconnect between perception and reality, scientists can better understand which brain regions and processes help us interpret the world around us. The illusion above highlights change blindness, the brain's failure to notice shifts in the environment, especially when they occur gradually. To some extent, all sensory experience is illusory, Dr. Martinez-Conde asserts. 'We are always constructing a simulation of reality,' she said. 'We don't have direct access to that reality. We live inside the simulation that we create.' She and Dr. Macknik have run the illusion contest since 2005. What began as a public outreach event at an academic conference has since blossomed into an annual competition open to anyone in the world. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
26-06-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
STRADVISION Wins 2025 AI Breakthrough Award for SVNet
- Recognized Among Global AI Leaders for Innovation in Automotive Perception Software SEOUL, South Korea, June 25, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- STRADVISION, a trailblazer in AI-driven perception technology for the automotive industry, today announced that its flagship software product, SVNet, was honored as a winner in the 2025 AI Breakthrough Awards. This distinguished accolade places STRADVISION alongside global innovators such as NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and UiPath, affirming its position as a top-tier innovator in artificial intelligence. Now in its 8th year, the AI Breakthrough Awards are part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform that highlights the most innovative companies and technologies across today's most competitive tech sectors, including AI, FinTech, Cybersecurity, Digital Health, and more. With over 5,000 nominations received from around the world, the 2025 program marked a record-setting level of competition. SVNet is a lightweight yet powerful deep learning-based perception software that enables real-time object detection and classification, optimized to run on low-power automotive processors. Engineered for seamless integration into large-scale production vehicles, SVNet meets the rigorous performance standards required for both Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving systems. This latest recognition follows STRADVISION's continued global growth and expanding partnerships with leading OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers. The award further validates STRADVISION's leadership in AI innovation, as the company continues to deliver scalable, production-ready software that is shaping the future of intelligent transportation. "We're honored to be recognized as a 2025 AI Breakthrough Award winner," said Philip Vidal, CBO of STRADVISION. "This award highlights the transformative impact of our AI perception solutions in advancing vehicle safety and autonomy. It's a testament to the talent and dedication of our global team, and a proud milestone on our journey to redefine automotive intelligence." For more information on STRADVISION and its cutting-edge technologies, please visit STRADVISION. About STRADVISION Founded in 2014, STRADVISION is an automotive industry pioneer in artificial intelligence-based vision perception technology for ADAS. The company is accelerating the advent of fully autonomous vehicles by making ADAS features available at a fraction of the market cost compared with competitors. STRADVISION's SVNet is being deployed on various vehicle models in partnership with OEMs; can power ADAS and autonomous vehicles worldwide; and is serviced by over 300 employees in Seoul, San Jose, Detroit, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Dusseldorf. STRADVISION has been honored with Frost & Sullivan's 2022 Global Technology Innovation Leadership Award, the Gold Award at the 2022 and 2021 AutoSens Awards for Best-in-Class Software for Perception Systems, and the 2020 Autonomous Vehicle Technology ACES Award in Autonomy (software category). In addition, STRADVISION and its software have achieved TISAX's AL3 standard for information security management, as well as being certified to the ISO 9001:2015 for Quality Management Systems and ISO 26262 for Automotive Functional Safety. View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE StradVision
CBS News
14-06-2025
- Science
- CBS News
How optical illusions are illuminating vital medical research
New York — At the Museum of illusions in New York City, around every corner is a wonder for the eyes. There's a vase that's a face, art that moves with you, and a room that seems to go on forever. It's a funhouse for our perceptions, built for the TikTok age. But the visual tricks are windows into how the mind works, and they fascinate scientists. "The brain uses all the information it can get to figure out what's in front of it," Dr. Martin Doherty, a psychology professor at the University of East Anglia in England, told CBS News. Doherty has studied one particular puzzle for years called the Ebbinghaus illusion, an optical illusion which shows how size perception can be manipulated using surrounding shapes. "The illusion works by using context to mess around with your perception," Doherty explains. Doherty long thought that everyone saw the Ebbinghaus illusion the same way. But in a study published in March in the journal Scientific Reports , he and his colleagues found that radiologists who have years of training to ignore visual distractions actually see the image differently and accurately. In the study, researchers tested 44 experts in "medical image interpretation" — radiographers and radiologists — against a control group of nonexperts consisting of psychology and medical students. They found that the experts were "significantly less susceptible to all illusions except for the Shepard Tabletops, demonstrating superior perceptual accuracy." "According to the theory, that shouldn't happen," Doherty said. "It shouldn't be possible. No previous research has shown that you can learn to see through them." One other group has also been shown to solve the illusion, young children. But that ability goes away after age 7, Doherty said. "We think that's because it takes time to learn to integrate context into your perception," Doherty said. It's evidence of the deep abilities of a trained brain. But for most of us, illusions are proof of our limitations. "When you see these visuals, it's just like your brain just starts going crazy," museumgoer Kevin Paguay said. It's also a reminder that you cannot always believe what you see.
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
A Trick of the Mind by Daniel Yon review – explaining psychology's most important theory
The process of perception feels quite passive. We open our eyes and light floods in; the world is just there, waiting to be seen. But in reality there is an active element that we don't notice. Our brains are always 'filling in' our perceptual experience, supplementing incoming information with existing knowledge. For example, each of us has a spot at the back of our eye where there are no light receptors. We don't see the resulting hole in our field of vision because our brains ignore it. The phenomenon we call 'seeing' is the result of a continuously updated model in your mind, made up partly of incoming sensory information, but partly of pre-existing expectations. This is what is meant by the counterintuitive slogan of contemporary cognitive science: 'perception is a controlled hallucination'. A century ago, someone with an interest in psychology might have turned to the work of Freud for an overarching vision of how the mind works. To the extent there is a psychological theory even remotely as significant today, it is the 'predictive processing' hypothesis. The brain is a prediction machine and our perceptual experiences consist of our prior experiences as well as new data. Daniel Yon's A Trick of the Mind is just the latest popularisation of these ideas, but he makes an excellent guide, both as a scientist working at the leading edge of this field and as a writer of great clarity. Your brain is a 'skull bound scientist', he proposes, forming hypotheses about the world and collecting data to test them. The fascinating, often ingenious research reviewed here is sorely in need of an audience beyond dusty scientific journals. In 2017 a Yale lab recruited voice-hearing psychics and people with psychosis to take part in an experiment alongside non-voice-hearing controls. Participants were trained to experience auditory hallucinations when they saw a simple visual pattern (an unnervingly easy thing for psychologists to do). The team was able to demonstrate that the voice-hearers in their sample relied more heavily on prior experience than the non-voice-hearers. In other words, we can all cultivate the ability to conjure illusory sound based on our expectations, but some people already have that propensity, and it can have a dramatic effect on their lives. To illustrate how expectations seep into visual experience, Yon's PhD student Helen Olawole Scott managed to manipulate people's ratings of the clarity of moving images they had seen. The key detail is that when participants had been led to expect less clarity in their perception, that is exactly what they reported. But the clarity of the image on the screen wasn't really any poorer. It's sometimes a shame that Yon's book doesn't delve deeper. In Olawole Scott's experiments, for example, does Yon believe that it was participants' visual experience itself that became less clear, or just their judgments about the experience? Is there a meaningful difference? He also avoids engaging with some of the limitations of the predictive processing approach, including how it accounts for abstract thought. Challenges to a hypothesis are interesting, and help illuminate its details. In an otherwise theoretically sophisticated discussion this feels like an oversight. One of the most enjoyable things popular science can do is surprise us with a new angle on how the world operates. Yon's book does this often as he draws out the implications of the predictive brain. Our introspection is unreliable ('we see ourselves dimly, through a cloud of noise'); the boundary between belief and perception is vaguer than it seems ('your brain begins to perceive what it expects'); and conspiracy theories are probably an adaptive result of a mind more open to unusual explanations during periods of greater uncertainty. This is a complex area of psychology, with a huge amount of new work being published all the time. To fold it into such a lively read is an admirable feat. A Trick of the Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality by Daniel Yon is published by Cornerstone (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
