Brain and Cogition Module 3 Chapter 10 Sensation and Perception

retina

the light-sensitive inner surface of the eye, containing: rods and cones, bipolar cells, and ganglion cells.

fovea

Provides our most accurate, precise vision.

sensation

The reception of stimulation from the environment and the encoding of it into the nervous system.

perception

The process of interpreting and understanding sensory information.

saccades

The fast movements when the eyes sweep from one point to another.

fixations

The pauses that interrupt saccades.

change blindness

Our failure to notice changes in visual stimuli (e.g., photographs) when those changes occur during a saccade.

inattention blindness

When we fail to see an object we are looking at directly because attention is directed elsewhere.

visual persistence

The apparent persistence of a visual stimulus beyond its physical duration.

visual sensory memory or iconic memory

Temporary visual buffer available after display offset.

span of apprehension

The number of items recalled.

whole report condition

Condition in which people are to report any letters they can.

partial report condition

Condition in which only one of the shown rows was to be reported.

icon

The visual image that resides in iconic memory; It is lost quickly.

decay

Loss of memory due to the passage of time, during which the memory trace is not used.

interference

Forgetting caused by the effects of intervening stimulation or mental processing.

backward masking

A brief visual stimulus after another brief visual stimulus that leads to failure to remember the first.

focal attention

Mental process of visual attention; The ... point of something is the thing that people concentrate on or pay most attention to.

trans-saccadic memory

The memory that is used across a series of eye movements to build an understanding of the visual world. Object files, visual (iconic) representations of individual objects, are used to track what is going on in the world.

- figure-ground Gestalt principle -

This states that people instinctively perceive objects as either being in the foreground or the background. They either stand out prominently in the front (the figure) or recede into the back (the ground).

templates

Stored models of all categorizable patterns.

feature analysis

The process of detecting specific elements in visual input and assembling them into a more complex form.

feature detection

The ability of the brain to identify specific components of visual stimuli such as corners or edges.

pandemonium model

Part of how humans group what they see into pictures and meaningful objects based on perception. While some aspects of grouping help humans to distinguish one object from another, others confuse the brain; This model consists of demons that represent certain neurons.

beta movement

Illusory movement that occurs when two or more pictures are viewed in rapid succession, as in a movie.

phi phenomenon

An illusion of movement created when two or more adjacent lights blink on and off in quick succession; An illusion of movement that arises when stationary objects—light bulbs, for example—are placed side by side and illuminated rapidly one after another.

bottum-up, data-driven processing system

When processing is driven by the stimulus pattern, the incoming data. The patterns to be recognized came in to the image demons at the bottom, then were processed at higher and higher levelsuntil the top-level demon finally recognized the pattern.

conceptually driven effects

Where context and higher-level knowledge influence lower-level processes.

context

The surrounding information and your own knowledge.

repetition blindness

The tendency to not perceive a pattern, whether a word, a picture, or any other visual stimulus, when it is quickly repeated; Cognition has just identified the stimulus, so it ''expects'' not to see the same thing again.

connectionist modeling

A computational approach that is often used in cognitive science.

input units

In a Connectionist network, these are basic "cells" that receive inputs from the environment.

hidden units

This level in the network is completely internal, always at least one step removed from an input/output unit.

output units

The units that report the system's response, say, to the question: "what is this word?"

geons

Basic "primitives" simple three-dimensional geometric forms; A combined form of geometric ions. Example: ''briefcase'' has two ..., the rectangular box and the curved cylinder.

agnosia

A failure or defecit in recognizing objects, either because the pattern of features cannot be synthesized into a whole or because the person cannot then connect the whole pattern to meaning; Often associated with damage to the left occipital and/or temporal lobes.

propagnosia

A disruption of face recognition; Often a result to damage to the fusiform gyrus.

apperceptive agnosia

A disruption in perceiving patterns (e.g., noability to discriminate between a square and a rectangle); Difficulty perceiving a whole pattern of Gestalt.

associative agnosia

Pattern recognition but no access to meaning.

the recognition by components theory

Theory that claims that we recognize objects by extracting or detecting three-dimensional components, geons, from visual stimuli, then accessing memory to determine what real-world objects contain those components.

audition

Our sense of hearing.

auditory sensory memory (or echoic memory)

A brief memory system that receives auditory stimuli and preserves them for some amount of time.

modality effect

Superior recall of the end of the list when heard instead of seen.

suffix effect

Inferior recall of the end of the list in the presence of an additional, meaningful, non-list auditory stimulus. For instance, if someone gives you a list of items to buy at the grocery store and then adds an unrelated comment, you may find it harder to remember the last item on the shopping list.

problem of invariance

The sounds of speech are not invariant (constant) from one time to the next.

phoneme

Smallest unit of sound in language.

- the effect of vocalization -

Duration of echoic memory is longer than iconic memory.