Most past vision research, however, has been based on experiments wherein clear images were shown to subjects in perfect lighting, says He. The current study instead analyzed visual perception as subjects looked at black-and-white images degraded until they were difficult to recognize. Nineteen subjects were shown 33 such obscured "Mooney images" -- 17 of animals and 16 humanmade objects -- in a particular order. They viewed each obscured image six times, then a corresponding clear version once to achieve recognition, and then blurred images again six times after. Following the presentation of each blurred image, subjects were asked if they could name the object shown. As the subjects sought to recognize images, the researchers "took pictures" of their brains every two seconds using functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI). The technology lights up with increased blood flow, which is known to happen as brain cells are turned on during a specific task. The team's 7 Tesla scanner offered a more than three-fold improvement in resolution over past studies using standard 3 Tesla scanners, for extremely precise fMRI-based measurement of vision-related nerve circuit activity patterns. After seeing the clear version of each image, the study subjects were more than twice as likely to recognize what they were looking at when again shown the obscured version as they were of recognizing it before seeing the clear version. They had been "forced" to use a stored representation of clear images, called priors, to better recognize related, blurred versions, says He. - www.sciencedaily.com