perception chun

Flashcards about Perception and Mental Imagery

What is perception?

The ability to recognize and interpret information from the senses.

What does perceiving involve?

Making sense of the raw stimulation conveyed by our senses.

What is modal completion?

part of an object missing but your brain automatically completes it

What is amodal completion?

Where you seem to perceive an object despite an apparently obstructed view.(part of an object is entirelly hidden/blocked from view)

What is bottom-up information?

The sensory input, such as an image coming through the eyes.

What is top-down information?

Knowledge and expectations that influence and enhance our interpretation of sensory input.

What is the retina?

The light-sensitive part of our eyes.

What is the fovea?

The center of the retina, containing densely packed photoreceptors known as cones.

What highlights the interplay between bottom-up and top-down information?

Ambiguous figures.

What can help us choose an interpretation for an ambiguous image?

Knowledge of context.

What does experience tell us about how objects are illuminated?

Objects are illuminated from above.

What did Hermann von Helmholtz describe the process of perception as?

Unconscious inference.

What is predictive coding?

The visual brain making predictions about what input the eyes are about to receive.

How do predictive coding theories envision the brain?

Constant generator of expectations about the world.

What does it mean for perception to be cognitively impenetrable?

That perception proceeds without influence from high-level cognition.(beliefs, knowledge)

What is object segmentation?

Visually assigning the elements of a scene to separate objects and backgrounds.

What is the problem of Figure-ground organization?

Which side of the boundary belongs to the object (or figure) and which side of the boundary belongs to the background (or ground).

What are the rules the mind follows to resolve figure-ground competition?

The rule of enclosure, rule of symmetry, and rule of convexity.(+meaningfullness)

What is occlusion?

Views of objects are often partially blocked by other objects. The brain needs to “fill in,” or infer, the missing information.

What is boundary extension?

When people tend to remember pictures as having extended beyond their edges.

What is the inverse projection problem?

We live in a three-dimensional (3-D) world, but the input to our eyes is two-dimensional (2-D).

What is binocular disparity?

Each eye gets a slightly different view than the other.(the closer sth is to you, the greater the difference)

What is linear perspective?

The way parallel lines appear to move closer together and converge on a single point as they recede into the distance.

texture gradient

textural elements appear to get smaller and more densely packed together as they recede into the distance

binocular depth cues

visual cues that require both eyes to be effective

object constancy

although the same object looks very different on the retina depending on its orientation, people are good at recognizing objects despite their orientation

size constancy

the perception that an object maintains a constant size, even when viewed from different distances (despite radical differences in their image size on the retinae)

color constancy

when our visual system factors in differences in illumination when shaping our color perception

lightness constancy

when we factor in illumination conditions when perceiving the brightness of things