AP Psych Unit Two-Cognition

selective attention

concentration on certain stimuli in the environment and not on others, letting important stimuli to be distinguished from peripheral or incidental ones

inattentional blindness

a failure to notice unexpected but perceptible stimuli in a visual scene while one’s attention is focused on something else in the scene (gorilla basketball experiment)

change blindness

a failure to notice changes in the visual array appearing in two successive scenes (tourist-door experiment)

perceptual set

a temporary readiness to perceive certain objects or events rather than others; schema

schema

basic knowledge about a concept or entity that serves as a guide to perception, interpretation, imagination, or problem solving;

gestalt

the idea that the mind perceives patterns or configurations instead of individual parts 

figure-ground

use of phsyical dimensions of an object against its background (football officials watching field goals)

grouping

the brain groups things/ideas (finger counting)

depth perception

awareness of three-dimensionality, solidity, and the distance between the observer and the object

visual cliff

experiment done to investigate the development of depth perception in nonverbal human infants and in nonhuman animals, and whether depth perception is an innate ability or learned through experience

binocular cues

means used to inform the visual system about the depth of a target or its distance from the observer that require integration of information from the two eyes and include signals about the convergence of the eyes and binocular disparity

convergence

the rotation of the two eyes inward toward a light source so that the image falls on corresponding points on the foveas (form a single image)

retinal disparity

the slight difference between the right and left retinal images

monocular cues

means used to inform the visual system about the depth of a target or its distance from the observer that require only one eye and include signals about the state of the ciliary muscles, atmospheric perspective, linear perspective, and occlusion of distant objects by near objects

stroboscopic movement

the apparent motion of a series of separate stimuli occurring in close consecutive order (motion pictures)

phi phenomenon

an optical illusion where the perception of movement is created by viewing a rapid succession of stationary images, rather than actual motion

autokinetic effect

an optical illusion where a stationary point of light in a dark, featureless environment appears to move

perceptual constancy

the phenomenon in which an object or its properties (e.g., size, shape, color) appear unchanged despite variations in the stimulus itself or in the external conditions of observation, such as object orientation or level of illumination

color constancy

the tendency to perceive a familiar object as having the same color under different conditions of illumination

perceptual adaptation

the brain's process of adjusting its interpretation of sensory information to a new or changed environment, leading to altered perception (helps brain focus on important stimuli)