Professor Kohler has published a new paper with co-author Alasdair DF Clarke in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, titled The human visual system preserves the hierarchy of 2-dimensional pattern regularity. Wallpaper groups are a class of 17 distinct textures that resemble beautiful Victorian wallpapers and feature heavily in Islamic art. In each wallpaper group, unique combinations of symmetries tile the image plane, unlike the individual symmetries typically used in vision research. The results show that the symmetry content of each texture is reflected in both brain activity and symmetry detection performance, indicating that the human brain encodes symmetries with a high level of precision. This opens new avenues for research on how symmetries in textures contribute to natural vision and may help explain the prevalence of symmetries in human artistic expression. The lab has more work underway using the wallpaper group stimuli, so stay tuned if you find them as interesting as we do!