PS1080 exam

What did Decartes believe about sensations?

Fluid in nerves was pushing sensations into brain

What’s are information processing paradigms?

Theory in cognitive psychology that compares the mind to a computer

What did Babbage create in 1832?

Cogwheel brain (gears perform mathematical equations)

What did Neumann create in 1958 that aided modern neuroscience?

Game to find out how ‘human’ machines are

What did Albert Magnus 1260 speculate about the functional roles of 3 ventricles?

Common sense/creative rational thought/memory

What idea about the brain did Franz Gall come up with in 1812?

Phrenology

Information needs to be… and… to allow us to gain insight

Collected/sorted

What is a perceptual filter responsible for?

Channel tuning/size/frequency

What is a perceptual bottleneck responsible for?

Channel capacity (1/min bps)

Aristotle maintained that animals must have… if they are to live

Perception

What animals use magnetic field to aid them in their lives?

Birds/Salmon/turtles

Examples of echolocation

Bats/Californian kid

What are two examples of transfer across sensory modalities?

Ventriloquism/Synaesthesia

What are 7 of the main Gestalt concepts?

Praegnanz/similiarity/symmetry/proximity/smooth continuation/closure/common fate

What is the optic array?

Pattern of light that falls onto retina

What is the flowfield?

Visual representation of movement of objects or substances

What are object affordances?

Physical or functional properties of an object that suggest how it can be used or interact with

What is resonance?

Object vibrates at particular frequency and causes a nearby object to do the same

What is a Bayesian estimation?

Statistical method that uses prior knowledge about the probability of certain events to make predictions

What does a receptor do?

Transform stimuli to neural signal

What is the receptive field involved in?

Localisation and tuning

What is encoding?

Fundamental steps of information processing to convert the outside world into internal events

Who came up with psychophysics?

Gustav T Fechner

What is illusory depth?

Visual illusion that creates perception of depth in 2D images

What are the steps in the flow of visual information by Decartes?

Mapping/transmission/inversion

What is spatial vision?

Ability of the visual system to perceive and interpret spatial information (position, size…)

The amount of light on an image is essentially…

Black and white

What is luminance?

Objective measurement of the amount of light emitted

What is brightness?

Subjective perception of how intense the light appears to be

An 8 bit computer has no more than… levels of grey

256

What is the brightness contrast illusion?

Two squares appear to be different brightness despite being equi-luminant

Stimulus intensity is…?

Lightness

What is simultaneous contrast?

Perception of one colours is affected by presence of adjacent colour

What is a Hermann Grid?

Grid of black squares wherein grey spots appear in the cross sections

What is a retinotopic map?

Neural representation of visual field in the brain

What are opponency receptive fields?

Areas of visual system that respond in opposite ways to different types of visual stimuli

Excitation ‘sum’

Excitation - inhibition

Afterimages of illusions are the consequence of…?

Encoding stimulus - change in time

3 steps about aftereffects of visual illusions

Adaptation/Opponency/perceived aftereffects

What are pictorial cues?

Visual cues in an image that allow a person to perceive depth and distance

What are binocular cues?

Visual cues that brain uses to perceive depth - require use of two eyes

What are two examples of binocular cues?

Stereopsis/convergence

What is the relative size cue?

Objects of same size appear smaller the farther away they are

What is an example of a real world size illusion?

Ames room

Why does the Ames room work?

Misleading geometry generates incorrect frame of reference

Space and time together is…

Motion

Successive motion contrast is… (coin shrinking)

Opponency mechanism in time

What is an illusion?

Perceive things differently from what they actually are

What is successive colour contrast?

Colour contrast occurs not in space but in time

What is object perception?

Ability to visually understand and recognise objects in the environment

Retina highlights areas at contrast boundaries as these are areas of…

Discontinuity

Neurons higher in the visual cortex respond more to…

Certain colours

Low level analysis of a image would include things like…

Brightness/colour/contrast

High level analysis of a image would include things like…

Meaning/culture

What rule of Gestalt psychology overrules proximity?

Similarity

What is lateral inhibition?

Active nerve cell surprises activity of adjacent cells, allowing for contrast enhancement and edge detection in sensory systems

What is a view-independent representation?

Representing object that is not dependent on specific viewpoint

Face recognition steps = ?

Detection of a face - extract features that all faces have in common/discriminate from other faces (context)/categorised/attributes ascribed/identify

When we see faces in everyday objects this is known as

Pareidolia

What is the face inversion effect? Yin 1969

Faces are more recognisable right way up

What are negative contrast faces? Kemp et al 1990

Reverse contrast (easier to recognise with normal colouring)

Upside down and negative faces McKone et al 2007

Better at recognising faces than animals or objects even when reverse shaded or upside down

What is the hollow face illusion?

Inverted mask painted - strong expectation mask will protrude

If one eye is closed…

Much depth is lost

The perceptual expectation for faces to be… overrides our…

Convex/knowledge

What is the knocked face illusion?

Blurred image that appears unstable or knocked

Face recognition is not the same as…

Object recognition

Patient C.K. has trouble recognising… but not…

Objects/faces

What is prosopagnosia?

Inability to recognise familiar faces

Neurons in the… are more likely to respond on the basis of identity

Inferiors temporal cortex

Neurons in the… respond to facial motion, posture and eye gaze

Superior temporal sulcus

Kanwisher et al 1997 fMRI revealed a…

Fusiform face area

The fusiform face area responds more to…

Faces than other common objects

Gauthier et al 1999-activation of middle fusiform face area…

Increases with expertise in recognising novel objects but still less activation than for faces

Holistic processing Tanaka & Farah 1993

Don’t store faces as parts but holistically

What is the composite face effect? Young et al 1987

When the top half of one face is aligned with the bottom half of another, and presented upright, the resulting composite arrangement induces a compelling percept of a novel facial configuration

What is the Thatcher illusion?

Eyes and lips are presented right way up while face is upside down

The Thatcher illusion proves that we…

Process features individually

What is the difference between feature detection and recognition?

Feature detection is a process of encoding low-level features/recognition involves understanding the meaning of objects

What is the retina?

Photosensitive area at back of eye

What is the fovea?

Small area in retina that is responsible for sharp and detailed vision (cones only)

What is peripheral vision?

Vision from corners of eyes that is blurry (cones and rods)

What are the 4 types of eye movement?

Horizontal/vertical/large noticeable movements/in-plane movements (torsion)

What are the types of eye movement?

Gaze shifting/gaze stabilising

What is gaze shifting?

Voluntary/moving eyes to take in new information

What are gaze stabilising mechanisms?

Involuntary/stabilising to keep movement on back of eye

What are the three gaze shifting mechanisms?

Smooth pursuit/saccades/vergence

What is smooth pursuit?

Track a moving object/ensure light from object stays focused on back of eye

Smooth pursuit requires…?

Feed back loop

What are saccades?

Fast, ballistic movements/700 degrees per second/most common/both eyes together

What is vergence?

Move eyes to focus on object at different distances away from us/move along horizontal plane

What are the two stabilising eye movements that are not under voluntary control?

Vestibulo-ocular reflex/optokinetic reflex

What is the vestibule-ocular reflex?

Helps maintain clear vision during **head movemen**t by producing eye movements int he direction opposite to head movements

What is the optokinetic reflex?

Stabilising visual images during **whole field motion**-combination of smooth pursuit and saccades

What are micro saccades?

Tiny, involuntary eye movements when we try to fix our gaze on a point

What are drifts and tremors?

Slow meandering motions between micro saccades/smalll oscillations on top of drifts

What is the current most common way to measure eye movements?

Eye-tracker

What does an eye-tracker involve?

Small camera focused on eye/software that tracks where eye looks/calibrate pupil position against fixed points on screen to work out where ppt is looking

What is dwell time?

How long a person’s gaze fixates at a certain point

Fixation measures can allow us to measure…

Dwell time/frequency of fixation/duration of fixation in total/order of fixation