Psychology Lecture Notes: Perception and Attention

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering perceptual organization, visual pathways, neuroplasticity studies, and attentional selection models from Chapters 3 and 4.

Size constancy

The perceptual phenomenon where an object further away looks smaller than one closer in distance.

Inverse projection problem

The ambiguity involved in determining the object in the world that created a specific image on the retina, as multiple different objects can create the same retinal image.

Bottom up processing

Data-driven processing that begins with sensory info input, progresses through stimuli processing, and leads to perception.

Top down processing

Processing driven by prior knowledge or expectation, moving from knowledge to perception, stimuli processing, and stimuli input.

Figure ground

A Gestalt principle of perception that distinguishes an object (figure) from its background (ground).

Proximity

A Gestalt principle stating that elements placed close together are grouped together in visual perception.

Closure

A Gestalt principle where the mind completes or closes incomplete shapes and patterns to perceive a whole object.

Similarity

A Gestalt principle stating that objects that look similar to one another are grouped together.

Good continuation

A Gestalt principle stating that the edge of one shape will continue into space and meet up smoothly with other shapes.

Common fate

A Gestalt principle where visual entities that move together are grouped together.

Praganz (simplicity)

A Gestalt principle stating that resulting perceptual structures tend to favor simple, symmetric, and regular organization so the structure is as simple as possible.

Helmhotlz's theory of unconscious inference

A theory addressing how we decide on a single perception given the ambiguity of the retinal image and the presence of multiple possible interpretations.

Blakemore and cooper (1970)

A study demonstrating experience-dependent plasticity in kittens raised in environments with only vertical lines, showing their brains tuned differently with fewer neurons for horizontal lines and more for vertical lines.

Greebles

Novel visual objects used by Gauthier to demonstrate experience-dependent plasticity; training participants to tell Greebles apart significantly increased activation in the fusiform face area (FFA).

Ventral stream (what)

The perception pathway running from the occipital to the inferior temporal cortex, responsible for identifying objects.

Agnosia

A sensory deficit resulting from a disruption in the ventral perception pathway, such as face blindness.

Dorsal stream (where)

The action pathway running from the occipital to the parietal cortex, involved in spatial localization.

Ataxia

A condition in which a person experiences a hard time knowing where their body is positioned relative to an object.

Ungerleider and mishkin (1982)

A study on monkeys showing that temporal lobe removal led to failure on an object discrimination task, whereas parietal lobe removal led to failure on a landmark discrimination task.

Cocktail party effect

An example of attentional bottleneck filtering where an individual surrounded by loud voices can still focus on and understand a single friend's voice.

Broadbent's filter model

An early selection model of attention where filtering depends on physical quality of sounds; follows the sequence: sensory store -> selective filter -> bottleneck -> higher level processing -> working memory.

Treisman's attenuation model

A late selection attentional model consisting of sensory store -> attenuating filter -> hierarchy of analyzers (syllables/words/grammar/semantics) -> working memory.

Deutsch and deutsch true late selection model

A late selection model proposing that both attended and unattended messages undergo full acoustic and semantic analysis before attentional selection occurs.

Lavie's load theory of attention

A theory stating that attentional resource allocation depends on task load (difficulty) and that processing of irrelevant stimuli depends on how much remaining mental capacity is available.