Unit 1A Perception

Perception

The process of organizing and interpreting information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects & event

Selective attention

The focusing of conscious awareness in a particular stimulus

Cocktail-party phenomenon

The ability to focus one’s listening attention on a single voice among a mixture of conversations & background noises, ignoring other conversations

International blindness

 Failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere

Change blindness

 A phenomenon of visual attention in which changes to a visual scene may go unnoticed under certain circumstances

Figure ground relationship

Our first perceptual decision is what in the image is the figure & what is the background

Bottom-up processing is also called?

Small chunk

Bottom-up processing

• Analysis that begins with the sense receptors and works up to the brain’s integration of sensory information

  • We use the features on the object itself to build a perception 

    • Individual elements lead to a concept

Top down processing is also called?

Large chunk processing

Top-down processing

• We use background knowledge to fill in gaps in what we perceive

• I _ant ch_co_ate ic_cr_am

• Based on our experiences & schemas- start with larger concept, then work down to finer details

Gestalt focus on?

Gestalt psychologists focused on how we group objects together

Gestalt psychology

We innately look at things in groups and not as isolated elements

• Proximity

• Similarity

• Continuity

• Closure

Depth cues (monocular cues)

Depth cues that don’t depend on having two eyes

Binocular cues

• Retinal disparity

• Convergence