It’s widely reported that we make judgements about people within seconds of meeting them for the first time, with various studies showing that things like the shape of our face are incredibly powerful in shaping those impressions.

Whilst that heuristic is fairly well established, what is perhaps less well known is how our brain achieves this.  A recent study set out to explore how our brains form first impressions as rapidly as they do.

The swiftness of the brain

The study revealed how we can often identify things such as animals that are inside much larger images within a fraction of a second.

It emerged that this rapid response is often driven by the primary visual cortex, which is a shift from previous thinking that supposed more complex parts of the brain were called into action for such heavy duty processing.

It suggests that when we look at a scene for the first time, our brain is immediately able to categorize items based on things such as their shape and texture.

We then rely on other parts of the brain to perform more complex processing, such as what the images actually are.

The finding emerged after the researchers trawled through data from studies whereby participants looked at hundreds of images.  This data was then fed into computer programs to attempt to mimic the processing of the primary cortex whilst these images were being viewed.

The program was quickly able to distinguish images that had animals in them from images of normal outdoor scenes due to the increase in curved edges and textures in the animal pictures.

The authors believe that their discovery could help in the development of image search engines by helping applications to better classify images according to the specific geometry of them.

“These results have far-reaching implications for explaining our sensory experience. They show that whenever we open our eyes, enter a room, or go around a corner we can quickly get the gist of a scene, well before figuring out exactly what we are looking at,” the authors conclude.