Welcome to Ravall, a blog run by a group of university students that covers a wide array of technology/science related topics. If you like what we do, feel free to follow us on twitter @ravall_blog, subscribe to our RSS feed in addition to voting for us on Google. Lastly, take the time to leave a comment. We love to see your viewpoints on topics covered.
If you have been keeping up with the latest in computing technology you have most likely heard about AMD’s Fusion APU platform. In laymen’s terms, an Accelerated Processing Unit consists of a CPU (Central Processing Unit) in addition to a GPU (Graphics processing unit) on a single die. The benefit of this architecture is the ability to seamlessly perform tasks taking advantage of Hardware Acceleration like video decoding and 3d rendering without having to ping the CPU (As seen in Youtube demonstrations for their Llano family of APU’s).
While browsing Reddit this week, I came across an optical illusion dealing with our perception of colours. The image in question (attached below) uses identical colours to generate a perception of blue and green spiraling bands (Yes, those bands really are just one colour). Needless to say, there was much amazement surrounding the image over at Discovermagazine’s blog post. Unfortunately, not a single individual on Reddit or Discovermaganize was able to name this infamous effect (let alone explain it). As a result, having taken Sensory and Perception recently I thought it would be interesting to discuss Lateral Inhibition and it’s impact’s on our perception of colours.
One of the more interesting topics covered in our Sensory Perception class last semester was the McGurk effect. Named after Henry McGurk, the phenomenon highlights the complexity of the perceptual process and the involvement of various brain regions. As shown in the demonstration above, the McGurk effect displays the fact that our perception of speech is influenced not only by sound, but also by vision. In this article, we will briefly examine why the McGurk effect occurs.
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