Vision is one of the five senses that enable us to perceive the world around us. Vision allows us to make quick judgements based on what is happening around us. When we are crossing the street, for example, we heavily rely on our sight to warn us of a car approaching and if it is safe to cross to the other side. Individuals without sight, though their other senses adapt and become stronger, are still at a disadvantage due to the loss of sight. Blind individuals are not allowed to serve on juries due to the fact that they cannot rely on their visual cues to make judgments. Vision is extremely important and yet we may not know as much as we may think we do about the visual system nor the psychological impacts that vision has on our lives. Can we truly give vision all the credit we currently give it to not lead us astray?
In the research article, “Justice Is Not Blind: Visual Attention Exaggerates Effects of Group Identification on Legal Punishment,” Granot and colleagues had participants watch a violent encounter between a police officer and civilian, after which the participants were told to rank the severity of punishment they believed the officer deserved. The researchers observed the effect ingroup or outgroup bias has on punishment rulings. Granot and colleagues concluded that decisions based off of visual information can be extremely divided or united depending on a variety of factors including visual attention and affiliation to either an ingroup or outgroup. The more closely two differently affiliated individuals focus on visual stimuli, the more divided their rulings of punishment will be. In a courtroom setting, this information is extremely important to consider because although each juror is seeing the same thing, their decisions will continue to be split due to the fact that not only do their individual biases get in the way, but each juror’s amount of attention given to the visual stimuli will vary, thus dividing their responses.
In addition, the article, “What Mice Watching Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil Can Teach Scientists about Vision,” by Sharon Begley, explains how little we know about the visual system. Based on textbooks, it is thought that neurons located in the primary visual cortex first respond to edges. Once these neurons have processed a variety of edges in different orientations, higher order neurons put the edges together to make up an object or scene. However, this textbook definition did not hold up well in an experiment that looked at the firing of neurons in mice while watching the film “Touch of Evil.” While watching this film, which includes an assortment of imagery, a mere 10% of visual neurons responded to edges. In addition, scientists discovered during this study that in some areas of the brain a majority of the visual neurons did not respond to any stimuli but were completely silent. Scientists concluded that there are at least 10 distinct types of visual neurons responding to different stimuli and yet they are not sure what a large portion of the visual neurons actually do.
In another article, “How to Make a Mouse Hallucinate,” by Karen Weintraub, a few neurons were activated using a light signal that triggered visual hallucinations in mice. Given the small number of cells that were manipulated in order to cause visual hallucinations, the scientists began to wonder why we aren’t all walking around hallucinating. If so few cells are involved in hallucinations, how can we be sure that we don’t hallucinate random objects or people in our day to day activities?
In putting these experiments on vision together and how it impacts both the legal system and our everyday lives, we must understand that we may not be able to rely on our vision as much as we originally thought. The visual cues that we so heavily rely on may be completely distorted due to personal experiences and biases, our nervous system may mix things up and a few of our neurons involved with hallucinations may be activated instead of a neuron involved in detecting edges, or we may simply pay attention to one thing over another. The list could go on and on but suffice it to say that our vision may not be as reliable as we think.
Granot, Y., Balcetis, E., Schneider, K. E., & Tyler, T. R. (2014). Justice is not blind: Visual attention exaggerates effects of group identification on legal punishment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(6), 2196.
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