Cognitive Psychology Chapter 3: Goldstein 4th Edition

What Pathway

Neural pathway, extending from the occipital lobe to the temporal lobe, that is associated with perceiving or recognizing objects.

Where Pathway

Neural pathway, extending from the occipital lobe to the parietal lobe, that is associated with neural processing that occurs when people locate objects in space.

Action Pathway

Neural pathway, extending from the occipital lobe to the parietal lobe, that is associated with neural processing that occurs when people take action.

Bottom-up Processing

Processing that starts with information received by the receptors. This type of processing can also be called data-based processing.

Brain Ablation

A procedure in which a specific area is removed from an animal's brain.

Experience-Dependent Plasticity

A mechanism that causes an organism's neurons to develop so they respond best to the type of stimulation to which the organism has been exposed.

Gestalt Psychologists

A group of psychologists who proposed principles governing perception, such as laws of organization, and a perceptual approach to problem solving involving restructuring.

Landmark Discrimination Problem

Problem in which the task is to remember an object's location and to choose that location after a delay.

Light-From-Above Assumption

The assumption that light is coming from above.

Likelihood

In Bayesian inference, the extent to which the available evidence is consistent with the outcome.

Likelihood Principle

Part of Helmholtz's theory of unconscious inference that states that we perceive the object that is most likely to have caused the pattern of stimuli we have received.

Oblique Effect

The finding that vertical and horizontal orientations can be perceived more easily than other (slanted) orientations.

Perception

Conscious experience that results from stimulation of the senses.

Principles of Perceptual Organization

Rules proposed by the Gestalt psychologists to explain how small elements of a scene or a display become perceptually grouped to form larger units.

Perception Pathway

Neural pathway, extending from the occipital lobe to the temporal lobe, that is associated with perceiving or recognizing objects.

Physical Regularities

Regularly occurring physical properties of the environment. For example, there are more vertical and horizontal orientations in the environment than oblique (angled) orientations.

Regularities in the Environment

Characteristics of the environment that occur frequently.

Principle of Similarity

Law of perceptual organization that states that similar things appear to be grouped together.

Semantic Regularities

Characteristics associated with the functions carried out in different types of scenes.

Principle of Simplicity

Law of perceptual organization that states that every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible. Also known as the law of pragnanz and the principle of good figure.

Speech Segmentation

The process of perceiving individual words within the continuous flow of the speech signal.

Unconscious Inference

Helmholtz's idea that some of our perceptions are the result of unconscious assumptions that we make about the environment.

Top-down Processing

Processing that involves a person's knowledge or expectations. Processing that originates in the brain, a the "top" of the perceptual system. This type of processing has also been called knowledge-based processing.

Apparent Movement

An illusion of movement perception that occurs when stimuli in different locations are flashed one after another with the proper timing.

Bayesian Inference

The idea that our estimate of the probability of an outcome is determined by the prior probability (our initial belief) and the likelihood (the extent to which the available evidence is consistent with the outcome).

Inverse Projection Problem

the task of determining the object that caused a particular image on the retina.

Placebo

a pill or procedure that patients believe delivers active ingredients (usually pain killers), but which contains no active ingredient.

Scene Schema

A person's knowledge about what is likely yo be contained in a particular scene.

Viewpoint Invariance

the ability to recognize an object seen from different viewpoints.

Law of Pragnanz

law of perceptual organization that states that every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible. Also called the principle of good figure and the principle of simplicity.

statistical learning

characteristics of language

Ambiguity

that a particular pattern of stimulation on the retina can be cause by a large # of objects in the environment

semantic regularities

characteristics associated with the functions carried out in different types of scenes

fusiform face area

face recognition

transitional probabilities

the chances that one sound will follow another sound

Greebles

families of computer-generated "beings" that all have the same basic configuration but differ in the shapes of their parts

brain ablation

the study of the effect of removing parts of the brain in animals

object discrimination problem

A problem in which the task is to remember an object based on its shape and choose it when presented with another object after a delay.

mirror neurons

Frontal lobe neurons that fire when performing certain actions or when observing another doing so.

mirror neuron system

network of neurons hypothesized to play a role in creating mirror neurons