AP PYSCH: Unit 2: Perception Vocabulary (2.1)

Perception

Process of organizing and interpreting the sensory information, enabling us to recognize objects and events and give them meaning.

• Makes us understand things

Selective Attention

Focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus(something).

Focusing on on particular thing.

Inattentional Blindness

Failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed somewhere else.

Change Blindness

Failing to notice changes in the environment.

Perceptual Set

Mental predisposition that functions as a lens through which we perceive the world

Gestalt: school of psychology

• How we see and perceive the world

• our brains want to form patterns and make sense of the whole picture.

Figure Ground

Organization of visual field into objects.

• Immediately want to see something (understanding)

Grouping

Brain tries to group similar things.

Depth Perception

Ability to see objects in three dimensions.

• Estimate objects distance from us

Visual Cliff

An apparent, but not actual, drop from one surface to another.

• Creates visual illusion

Binocular Cue

Depth cues that depend on the use of two eyes

• Require both eyes to perceive depth and distance

Convergence

inward movement of both eyes when focusing on nearby objects that help determine how close or far away an object is

Retinal Disparity

Left and right fields of vision provide slightly different visual images when focusing on a single object.

• Perceive depth and distance

Monocular Cue

Depth cues that are available of either eye alone.

Stroboscopic Movement

the illusion that a series of still images, shown rapidly in sequence, are actually a single continuous moving picture.

Phi Phenomenon

Adjacent lights blink on and off in quick succession

Autokinetic Effect

Phenomenon of visual perception in which a small point of light in an otherwise dark or featureless environment appears to move

Perceptual Constancy

Tendency to see familiar objects as having consistent color, size, and shape regardless of changes in lighting distance, or angle of perspective

Color Constancy

Perceiving objects as having a consistent color, even as illumination changes

Perceptual Adaptation

Remarkable ability to adjust to changing sensory input

Bottom-up Processing

• Starts at the sensory receptors and working it’s way up to the higher levels of processing new things.

Top-Down Processing

Creates perceptions from the sensory receptors and works with your own experiences

Cocktail Party Effect

Individuals can focus a single conversation in a noisy environment while filtering out background noise.