Setting the Scene

The outside world is a big place – full of sights, sounds and smells – and our brains need to make sense of it. We continually need to know where we are, where we came from, and what we are going to do next. But it's so full of information we'd suffer from a sensory overload if we tried to process it all at once. To help us grasp what's going on, our brains selectively build up a picture of the scene around us by piecing together key bits of information and drawing on what we already know. Understanding how we do this is a big challenge for neuroscientists and psychologists, as it's hard to reproduce real life situations in the lab. So researchers are using audio-visual projections to mimic the outside world, such as the scenes in these pictures, to get a better grip on how people process them.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image by Olli Rummukainen and colleagues
• Aalto University, Finland
• Originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Research published in PLOS One, May 2014