The eyes have it/Rev II

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The eyes have it - Rev 1, is pretty extensive as the notion of sight is rather interesting because the instrument enabling it to happen first appeared in the Ediacaran over 555 million years ago. 

Why all this palaver? Well, it seems front loading applies when the entity in question sees something interesting to investigate, in this case, a person calculating 2 + 2 = 4 by starting the calc when seeing the first number before the calculation is finished because priming the pump of thinking is necessary before doing anything of consequence, something all life forms do when dealing with the vagaries of reality. 

To whit.

People often solve simple arithmetic problems, such as basic addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, in their minds. The precise mental processes they rely on to solve these problems, however, are not entirely clear. Researchers at Université de Bordeaux and UCLouvain recently tried to better understand how humans tackle simple math mentally by tracking the size of their pupils.

Their findings, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, suggest that the human brain starts solving these problems before it receives all the information and relies on Bayesian inference. This is a reasoning approach used to make decisions under varying levels of uncertainty, which entails combining prior beliefs with new information.

"Our core hypothesis was that when people solve an addition problem, they don't wait passively for all the numbers before starting to compute," explained Zénon. "Instead, as soon as they hear the first number, the brain begins updating a kind of internal probability map of likely answers, eliminating implausible results. The more informative the first number, the greater this 'information gain,' and the more cognitive work the brain does at that early stage."

The researchers' observations were consistent across all three experiments. Specifically, they found that people's pupils dilated more when the first number they were presented with carried more information; or in other words, whether it offered more clues about what the likely solution to the problem was.

"This happened even before participants heard the second number, showing that the brain was already updating its expectations at that early stage," said Zénon. "Interestingly, participants who showed larger pupil responses to the first number were subsequently faster at producing the correct answer. This shows that this early cognitive work that used only the first number was very helpful in simplifying the problem and getting faster to the answer once the second number was available."

Now think a lioness going after a zebra. The processing is not arithmetic, it's dinner. Her pupils will dilate while doing the calc of how to get the zebra. This amazing research relates to how all life tackles problems as the eyes have it without question. :)

Major stages in the evolution of the eye in vertebrates

Factoid

The first possible fossils of eyes found to date are from the Ediacaran period (about 555 million years ago),[5] while the oldest certain fossilized eye is from a Schmidtiellus reetae fossil from 530 mya, collected in Saviranna in northern Estonia. The structure is similar to the compound eyes of modern-day dragonflies and bees, but with (~100) ommatidia spaced further apart, and without a lens.[6][7] The lower Cambrian had a burst of apparently rapid evolution, called the "Cambrian explosion". One of the many hypotheses for "causes" of the Cambrian explosion is the "Light Switch" theory of Andrew Parker: it holds that the evolution of advanced eyes started an arms race that accelerated evolution.[8] Before the Cambrian explosion, animals may have sensed light, but did not use it for fast locomotion or navigation by vision.