#visual information

Cognition is handled by the cerebral cortex, which is a tool of reasoning; it is a sophisticated tool, but it hasn’t yet been polished by evolution and therefore it’s pretty slow. It requires more effort to process information. Raw visual information is processed by the thalamus, a much older part of the brain than the cerebral cortex. It takes only a few hundred milliseconds to process visual stimuli (much faster than we process text or numbers). So, processing visual data is faster, and it reduces the cognitive load. We’re not aware of the amount of data and the speed with which we process visual information. It’s subconscious. This phenomenon is known as “pre-attentive processing”.

Even when the internet gods are smiling on us, the quality of input information from a virtual meeting comes up short, says Philip Smith, who runs the Vision and Attention Laboratory at the University of Melbourne. "We're dealing with a speech signal that's degraded relative to face-to-face speech, even with a good internet connection, so the cognitive load required to process or decode it is greater." This signal includes visual as well as audio information. That's because we don't just listen with our ears; much of what we understand comes from what we see. And it turns out it's not so easy to read a virtual room. Watching a person from their shoulders up means you miss out on loads of body language. Plus if you've ever watched a movie or TV show where an actor's mouth and their speech are out of sync, you know just how off-putting lags can be. "In general, 100 milliseconds is the critical time period for us to experience things as synchronous or asynchronous," Professor Smith says. "So anything that occurs within about a 100-ms window is experienced as a unitary thing. "And if you separate things by much more than 100 ms, you start to experience them as different and separated." Such latency issues are commonplace with video calls, and require your brain to work just that little bit harder to match what it sees with what it hears.

I can absolutely not keep up with fight scenes in movies and tv shows(big ones like when they're supposed to potray a war of some sort), it just turns into a blur in my head and I cant really see whats going on. Is that an autism thing possibly?

Moments Of Delight – Using Animation To Personalise Corporate Messages

For the study, published today in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers recruited 11 adults who were “experienced” Pokémon players — meaning they began playing between the ages of five and eight, continued for a while, and then played again as adults — and 11 novices. First, they tested all of the participants on the names of pokémon to make sure the pros actually could tell a Clefairy from a Chansey. Next, they scanned the participants’ brains while showing them images of all 150 original pokémon (in rounds of eight) alongside other images, like animals, faces, cars, words, corridors, and other cartoons. In experienced players, a specific region responded more to the pokémon than to these other images. For novices, this region — which is called the occipitotemporal sulcus and often processes animal images — didn’t show a preference for pokémon.