IWA 3 psyc pt 2.

Simons & Rensink findings

1. Change blindness - generality of change blindness

Simons & Rensink Head-Swapping Experiment (1991):

1. Observers failed to notice when two cowboys in a photo switched heads during an eye movement (i.e. when their eye shifted from one part of the image to another)

   1. 50% of participants missed the change, showing limitations of visual awareness

Simons & Rensink filcker task

1. Image alternates between an original and a modified version, separated by a blank screen

   1. large changes such as an object disappearing took a long time to notice

Simons & Levin - Person Swap Experiment

• During conversation, one actor was replaced by another mid-interaction

  • some cover was made etc.

  • most participants did not notice, as their attention was diverted

Simons & Rensink, Change and attention

1. Changes to important objects are detected..

2. "Change Simultagnosia”

3. Attention ≠ Awareness

• Changes to important objects are detected faster (main vs background character)

• Even though people can attend to 4–5 items at once, they can only detect one change at a time.

• Even when paying attention, people still miss changes, suggesting attention alone is not enough for conscious perception.

Simons & Rensink - grouping effects

1. Objects with similar colors are stored together, making grouped changes harder to detect

   1. removal of one camouflaged soldier

Simons & Rensink - expertise effects

1. You perceive changes faster in areas you have expertise in

   1. i.e. i would perceive somethings changed in a volleyball game

   2. drug users more likely to detect changes in images of drug paraphernalia

Simons & Rensink - mindsight

1. some participants felt a change before consciously identifying it

   1. suggests non-conscious perception mechanisms

Simons & Rensink- Misconceptions & Limits of Change Blindness Research

• Change blindness does not prove our mental representations are weak or absent.

• Some information is stored but may decay too quickly or be inaccessible for change detection.

• Change blindness does not disprove detailed visual memory—it only highlights its limitations.

Audition and Taste (chips)

1. When the sound of chips being eaten was magnified (i.e. the crunch)

   1. people thought they were fresher

   2. and crisper

Vision and Touch (Yamamoto & Kitazawa)

• side-by-side

• sticks crossed

• hands crossed

• sticks and hands crossed

1. When you are holding two sticks side by side, generally you are able to tell which one is tapped first

   1. unless they occur in very short intervals (middle section of graph)

2. When sticks crossed

   1. judgement becomes more difficult

3. When hands crossed

   1. judgement becomes more difficult

4. when sticks and hands crossed

   1. judgement returns to normal

Rubber Hand illusion

1. If we hide our hand from view, and position a rubber hand where ours should be

   1. we begin to think this rubber hand is ours

   2. stroke on the other hand feels like a stroke on our real hand

2. and when hit?

   1. we jump back like it physically hurts

Simons and Rensink Is there a gap?

• If the initial sensation IS complete, how

  • can change blindness happen?

    1. It is initially complete, but quickly forgotten (block 1)

    2. It is not the representation, but the comparison that fails (also block #4) (block 2)

       • i.e. our sensation captures everything correctly, however our mental comparisons fail causing change blindness

    3. The initially complete sensation is recoded in a way that precludes comparison (block 3)

Gap or no gap, perception is a process, a computation

• i.e. change blindness does not show that we do not capture all things in our perception

Grand Illusion

• Objectively, our perception is impoverished

• Subjectively, it does not feel so, it feels rich

  • all these images look about the same, as our perception fills in the gaps

Visual Search (find T)

Interrupted Visual search (Enns and Lleras)

Premise is that an image is repeatedly flashed on the screen, process of search goes as follows.

• Search is resumed after interruption.

  • epoch 1 is first glance

  • epoch 2 is the second glance

    • the reaction time starts at a higher value because you know where the t is, from the first glance

      • the two peaks go as follows

      • first peak is from the fact that their initial prediction was correct

    • Second peak occurs due to the fact that they happen to be in the right spot

• As if at the first glance we build some prediction of what we are about to see

• And then either confirm it or receive error feedback

• And use it to amend our next prediction

Predictive coding (enns & lleras)

1. Initial Active input

2. Prediction

   1. generated from past experience

3. Confirmation

   1. subjective confirmation “i see this object”

4. If this does not succeed, process loops

What does it mean cognitively

• perception isn’t that gap we talked about

  • the circle is in the perception in the agent environment loop

• that cgap is comparing the input that to the past memories and then testing.

Social Perception (Heider & Simmel, 1944)

1. ascribe mental states to shapes

   1. the two triangles are bullying the circle

   2. in a room in a door

Social perception cont.

1. what we see

   1. angry girl

2. what we infer without seeing

   1. we infer that the person next to her is her younger brother

Social Perception: What we see

• Sensory input

• Think about the students in your class or those you work with. What information do you collect or sense about them? Which sensory organs are you using? Do you see them? Smell them? Hear them?

• Faces are unique (face identity) • Voices are unique as well! And yes, we are surprisingly good at recognising just the voice.

• Smell – yes, and this sensory modality has strong emotional connections

Types of Social Information Collected (face)

• Facial expression

• Face identity

• Social category: Gender, age, SES

• Personality traits? Yes & No

Face and Context

• this guy looks angry, but with the added context of trash, it looks like disgust

Other Social info collected from a full image

• Body (e.g., tall or short?)

• What they are wearing (e.g.,

is it fashionable or not?)

• What they are doing (e.g., are

they reading a book, listening

to music, writing on their

computer; giving a lecture).

Gaze as social info

• Eye information can signal a person's attentional state (e.g., is the person aroused or fatigued)

• If someone avoids eye contact when you speak with them, it could be suggest that they are lacking in confidence, feeling guilt or shame over some action, or are overly deferential

• Certainly if I ask a question of the class, students will routinely avoid making eye contact with me because they don't know the content, or they are shy, or both

• And if someone is staring intently at you, you might wonder if they are trying to dominate, intimidate, or belittle you; or maybe they love you

Types of Social Information Collected - Other non-verbal cues

• Body posture might be read as someone being focused or not

• Looking at the distance between people one can infer if two people are friendly or intimate, or alternatively, having a professional relationship, in which case the distance might be greater.

• And then of course there's.....

• things about a mansplainer

Are different types of information treated equally?

No. Why?

• Saliency.

• Cognitive bias. This refers to a pattern in perception, interpretation, or judgment that is a systematic distortion of the objectively available information.

Biases - Negative cognitive vias

• The negative aspects of a person’s behavior (or personality) are attended to more, even when equally extreme positive information is present. This is called the negativity effect.

• One explanation is that we prioritise our survival, and negative information (e.g., someone behaving erratically, someone appearing ill) is particularly salient.

Biases - Positive cognitive bias

• Despite this, we have a tendency to evaluate people positively (Pollyanna hypothesis)

• Most behaviors a person makes are probably positive since their actions are controlled by social norms (e.g., bad at lie detection).

Halo and Horn Effect

• A bias by which one attribute (e.g., Bob is nice) influences impression of other, unrelated attributes (Bob is also smart).

• Can be positive or negative (the negative halo effect is sometimes called “Horn effect”).

Categories and Schemas

• One way we assign meaning is to use the information we collected to assign a person to a category or group.

• Each category has a schema, that is, a set of beliefs or expectations about the group that are presumed to apply to all members of the group and are based on past experience with other members of that group or information we have acquired about members of that group.

Schemas and memory

• Remember how we discussed that misleading information can result in people misremembering events in a manner that is consistent with the associated schema.

• Cars “smashed into each other” vs “had an accident”, can lead to misremembering of the event

Categories and Schemas

Types of schemas

• We have several types of schemas that we use to assign meaning to our world.

Role schemas,

• relate to how people carrying out certain roles or jobs are supposed to act.

Person schemas,

• relate to certain types of people such as professors, firefighters, geeks, and jocks.

Event schemas,

• tell us what is likely to occur in certain situations, such as when taking public transportation, going to a party, or attending a university lecture.

Categories and Schemas - Benefits of shcmes

• When we meet someone, we collect the aforementioned information and use it to place them in a category for which we have a schema. •

  • They are accessed quickly.

  • This can help us interact with others in a way that conforms with social norms

  • But schemas are also incomplete profiles, and thus prone to be inaccurate.

Categories and Schemas - Challenges to accuracy

• We have cognitive biases.

• And these biases can be quite inflexible.

• Primacy effect – The power of the first impression to frame future encoding.

• Belief perseverance - The tendency to maintain one’s schema even in the face of evidence that contradicts it. Why?

• Reflects a desire to maintain a relative positive self-image (I wasn't wrong!)

• Confirmatory hypothesis testing: One unknowingly creates opportunities for their beliefs to be confirmed while ignoring times when their beliefs are disproven

Attributions (heider) - Attribution theory (not on exams)

Why do we think people do what they do?

• According to attribution theory (Heider, 1958), people are motivated to explain their own and other people’s behavior by attributing causes of that behavior to one of two sources. Either:

  • a) something in themselves or a trait they have, called a dispositional attribution, or

  • b) to something outside the person called a situational attribution

Attributions (Jones & Davis, 1965) - Correspondent Inference theory

• The correspondent inference theory (Jones & Davis, 1965) provides one way to determine if a person’s behavior is due to dispositional or situational factors.

• In a nutshell, this theory suggests that:

  • a) if someone's behaviour is clearly situational (e.g., doing a job for work) or

  • b) if the behaviour is socially desirable, then one cannot infer much about the person. Otherwise, one can make attributions to the individual.

Summary of social perception

• Humans tend to attribute agency to self-propelling objects (Heider & Simmel, 1944). We are mind-reading machines

• Social perception includes

• inferring mental states from sensory information (face, voice, etc.)

• inferring mental states from other, conceptual information

• Social perception is liable to biases, just as non-social perception (illusions)

• In addition, categorical information (social categories, groups) has

powerful effects as well

• and it is inferred easily and rapidly

• Unlike purely perceptual processing (illusions), the influence of social

categories is penetrable (can be reversed by conscious effort and other

means).

• In understanding another person’s behavior (attribution), we are faced

with a conundrum: should the causes be attributed to dispositional or

situational factors?