Mary Potter, a professor in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and her team published a study on visual perception performance. They found that image visualization times shorter times than 100 milliseconds, or even 50 ms, previously believed, still produced significant recognition effects. Times as short as 13 ms still still produced better than chance results as identifying images.
Extensive work continues investigating this effect in many ways and to more clearly understand the neural processes involved in these very fast recognition effects. This article is rich in recent concepts in the visual processing arena.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health. The full study appears in the journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics.
MIT News. “MIT neuroscientists find the brain can identify images seen for as little as 13 milliseconds.” 16 January 2014.
http://news.mit.edu/2014/in-the-blink-of-an-eye-0116