Ichiro Kuriki Saitama University

Why do we feel satisfied when black-and-white photographs are colorized? The goal of our project is to justify a hypothesis, “perceptual noises are necessary to achieve a real sense of presence,” by psychophysics and functional brain imaging experiments. Here we refer to visual features that are irrelevant to the primary task at the moment as “noise.” Imagine a case of image processing for object recognition in a natural scene. Objects are colored and, sometime, moving. When processing a natural scene by computers, the performance of object recognition would be obviously better when color and motion are removed from images. Our hypothesis is that in the case of human visual system, we feel the sense of presence for an object when visual system is trying to remove the noise. Note but noises like scratches on films, irrelevant with the content of the picture, would not contribute to endorse the sense of presence; “noises (including colors)” that look innate to real objects may play an important role in increasing the apparent sense of presence or the reality of objects.