It is common to say 'I can't believe my eyes' when surprised by what we see. Recent scientific evidence suggests that we have a right to be sceptical and that what we see depends in no small part on what we expect to see.
It is normal to think of vision as beginning with the formation of an image on the back of the eye, which in turn stimulates a cascade of nerve impulses sending signals deep into the brain. It is in the brain's visual cortex that these signals are interpreted. Signals in the visual cortex also travel in the opposite "feedback" direction but much less in known about their function.
A recent paper in the journal Current Biology by graduate students Tamara Watson and Joel Pearson and their supervisor Dr Colin Clifford at Sydney University's School of Psychology, suggests that these feedback signals carry information about what we expect to see and that they act to constrain our interpretation of the incoming visual information.
'The separation between our eyes gives us two slightly different views of the world. Ordinarily, our brains fuse these two views to add depth to our visual world. However, if the two eyes' images are so different that they cannot be fused then we experience "binocular rivalry". During binocular rivalry, one eye's image is perceived and the other suppressed,' explained Dr Clifford.
'Every few seconds, perception switches spontaneously between the two images. While binocular rivalry is rarely encountered in the normal visual environment, it provides a useful means of probing the workings of the visual parts of our brain: although the visual stimulus is artificial, the brain is functioning in its usual way.'