if you look at this now I ask you what
is it you might say that's a pear. But in
fact it's not a pear, it's a piece of
china. This is real pear. And when you put
them side-by-side it's very easy to say
which one is which
but most of the time we don't get the
luxury of that. We see one object and we
have to decide what it is.
I'm professor Jane Raymond at the
University of Birmingham
in the Department of Psychology and my
area of research is understanding how we
categorize objects into different groups.
When we see something as real or when we
see something as not quite real how do
we make those decisions? There's a lot of
brain processes that go into that. We use
different sensory cues to decide if
something is the real thing or not quite
the real thing and we're interested in
understanding how quickly people can do
this and also what kinds of information
they use. Understanding how we
authenticate something is quite
important in the modern digital world
because there's so much fake information
fake news fake objects counterfeit
brands and even counterfeit money
because it's so easy to duplicate brand
packaging and visual information
counterfeit of all sorts of things is
becoming an increasing problem in fact
counterfeit goods costs worldwide
something like sixty four billion
dollars a year and it has a huge effect
on the economies around the world
This is due to lost revenue lost taxes and even
lost jobs and so here in my lab we're
working on the understanding of the
basics of how the brain codes when
something is real and when it's not real
we do a lot of work with banknotes
because those are interesting it's an
interesting problem and we try to help
central banks around the world
understand what makes a counterfeit easy
to see our makes that genuine note easy
to tell when it's real or not real great
deal of advance in material science that
makes what they call security features a
special printed areas on a note
particularly difficult to counterfeit
and they provide visual signals
or tactile signals sometimes to the
general public that they can use to say
oh this is real or this is not real so
we're helping the banks to understand
how they can use that kind of
information where they can put it on a
note, which one is better than another
and how people can do these
authentications so quickly kind of brain
signatures are involved in brain
processes so that's how we take basic
research in the lab on how we recognize
objects like how we decide is this a
pear or not a pear, and we apply it to
the real world to solve real-world
contemporary problems thanks very much
