One Frame

How fast can you see?

The last photo in every One Frame daily is on screen for 33 milliseconds, which is two refreshes of a typical screen, and yet players name it surprisingly often. Here's what vision research has learned about the first moments of seeing, and what your score can and can't tell you about yourself.

What happens in a glance

When a photo appears, your eyes turn the light into nerve signals and pass them through a series of visual areas in the brain, each of which builds a richer description than the one before, from edges to shapes to objects and whole scenes. Much of this first pass happens in a single quick sweep, without any time to take a second look.

In a well-known 1996 experiment, Simon Thorpe and colleagues flashed photos for 20 milliseconds and asked people whether each one contained an animal. Brain activity for animal and non-animal photos began to differ about 150 milliseconds after the photo appeared, which means the brain had sorted them before most people could have pressed a button.

Why a flash lasts longer than you'd think

In 1960 George Sperling showed that after an image vanishes, a detailed trace of it lingers for a fraction of a second and the brain can keep reading from it, so on its own a very short flash effectively lasts much longer than it was shown for. Researchers get around this with what they call a mask, an unrelated pattern shown immediately afterwards that wipes the trace out. Studies such as Bacon-Macé and colleagues (2005) found that with a mask in place, accuracy rises steadily with the length of the flash, and One Frame is built the same way, so the time listed for each round is the time you really get.

You get the gist before the name

You don't take in every part of a photo at the same speed. In very brief glances people first pick up the overall gist, such as whether a scene is natural or built, open or enclosed, indoors or outdoors. Michelle Greene and Aude Oliva (2009) found that these broad properties come through in flashes of only a few tens of milliseconds, before people can say what kind of scene it is, and when Li Fei-Fei and colleagues (2007) asked people to describe photos they had seen for between 27 and 500 milliseconds, they reported the overall scene first and needed longer to name specific objects.

At the extreme, Mary Potter and colleagues (2014) showed people streams of pictures at 13 milliseconds each, and they could still tell better than chance whether a picture matching a name like "picnic" had been in the stream, although they were far from reliable.

One Frame's scoring follows the same pattern. A broad answer like "bird" or "bridge" earns a few points at any speed, while naming the exact animal, car or landmark is worth much more and earns a bigger bonus the shorter the flash, because that's the hard part.

Why it slips away

A lot of players describe knowing what the photo was for an instant and then losing it, and research suggests that feeling is real. Potter's work on what she calls conceptual short-term memory found that people grasp the meaning of a briefly seen picture almost immediately but forget it within about a second unless they hold on to it with their attention. Recognising something and remembering it are separate steps, and a photo that vanishes at once leaves very little time for the second one.

That's why you can take as long as you like to type your answer, since the hard part is catching the photo in the first place.

Knowing a subject changes what you see

Being an expert in something changes how you perceive it, as well as how many names you know. Isabel Gauthier and colleagues (2000) found that bird experts and car experts use face-recognition areas of the brain when they look at birds and cars, as if those things had become as familiar as faces. Karla Evans and colleagues (2013) showed radiologists mammograms for half a second or less, and they could tell normal from abnormal better than chance even though they couldn't say where the problem was. In a classic study, William Chase and Herbert Simon (1973) found that chess masters could rebuild real game positions after a brief look far better than beginners could, but did no better when the pieces had been placed at random, because their advantage came from recognising meaningful patterns.

This is the reason One Frame keeps its subjects apart. If you know cars, you'll pick out a grille or a roofline in a flash that someone else would only see as "a car".

What your score says about you

Psychologists have long measured inspection time, which is how long a simple image needs to be shown, before a mask, for someone to judge it reliably. Across many studies, people with shorter inspection times tend to score somewhat higher on intelligence tests, and a 2001 meta-analysis by Grudnik and Kranzler put the strength of that link at about 0.5 after statistical corrections and about 0.3 before. That's a moderate pattern across large groups of people, and it says very little about any one person.

Your One Frame score depends on much more than raw speed, including how well you know the subject, which photos came up that day, your screen and lighting, whether you were looking at the dot, how tired you are, and plain luck. It's a game score rather than a test of intelligence, eyesight or health, so if you're worried about your vision or memory, please talk to a professional.

Speed and age

Processing speed, meaning how quickly the brain handles simple information, changes over a lifetime. A large online study by Joshua Hartshorne and Laura Germine (2015) found that it peaks in the late teens or early twenties, and Timothy Salthouse's research describes a gradual slowing through adulthood that he argues explains much of how other thinking skills change with age.

The same Hartshorne and Germine study found that other abilities peak much later, with vocabulary still improving past middle age. That matters in One Frame, because naming a photo takes the knowledge to name it as well as the speed to see it, so an older player who knows birds can easily beat a faster player who doesn't.

Your screen matters too

Most screens redraw 60 times a second, or about every 16.7 milliseconds, and many newer phones and monitors redraw 120 times. A photo can only be shown for a whole number of these refreshes, so One Frame's flash lengths of 250, 150, 100, 67, 50 and 33 milliseconds all work out to whole refreshes at both rates. The game never uses a single-refresh flash, because on a busy phone one skipped refresh would mean the photo never appeared at all. For the fairest game, turn your brightness up, avoid glare and hold the screen at a normal distance.

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