Cognitive Psychology - Chapter 2 Review

Proximal stimulus

The visual information registered by the sensory receptors of the retina.

Pattern recognition

The study of how sensory processes transform and organize raw information provided by sensory receptors.

Recognition-by-components

A process that involves the analysis of combinations of geons to recognize complex objects.

Illusory contour

A perceptual experience where edges seem to be physically present, although not shown.

Word superiority effect

The phenomenon where people identify a letter better when it appears in a meaningful word than in isolation.

Top-down processing

Word recognition that is influenced by contextual information.

Change blindness

A phenomenon where people fail to notice changes in a visual scene.

Holistic processing

Recognizing features of human faces better in the context of a whole face than in isolation.

Prosopagnosia

A condition where a person has trouble recognizing faces.

McGurk effect

Demonstrates that visual information can influence our speech perception.

Special mechanism approach

The proposal that speech perception requires a phonetic module in addition to general cognitive processes.