Detecting Visual Recognition

By Deane Barker on October 14, 2012

From Bench to Bunker: There is ground being broken in the field of visual recognition.  It turns out that your brain registers information about an image long, long before you’re cognizant of it.  And this mental reaction can be detected and measured.

In the following experiment, subjects are being shown satellite images of the desert at incredibly fast rates and are looking for man-made structures which might indicate a town or encampment.



I have heard of this being done in the past with recall of past images.  When you see something you’ve seen before, your brain reacts in a specific way.  So, a murder suspect being shown crime scene photos – which only the police and the actual murderer have seen – may react in a way that can be detected and used in court.