Every illusion has a backstage crew. New research shows the brain’s own “puppet strings”—special neurons that quietly tug our perception—help us see edges and shapes that don’t actually exist. When ...

A scientific dispute spanning six decades about fundamental mechanisms of visual perception in mammals has now been settled.

“Illusions are fun, but they are also a gateway to perception,” says Hyeyoung Shin, assistant professor of neuroscience at Seoul National University. Shin is the first author of a new study in Nature ...

Researchers have settled a 60-year-old debate in neuroscience, proving that the visual cortex constructs complex images from ...

Vision shapes behavior and, a new study by MIT neuroscientists finds, behavior and internal states shape vision. The research, published Nov. 25 in Neuron, finds in mice that via specific circuits, ...

Perhaps our most defining characteristic as a species, the six-layered human cortex, hosts billions of neural connections that bestow Homo sapiens with higher-order thinking. But how does this ...

When animals move through complex visual environments, the brain cannot afford to analyze every detail one by one. Instead, it rapidly extracts the overall structure of the scene—for example, the mean ...