Memory and Cognition Chapter 3

Perception

The interpretation of sensory information to yield a meaningful description or understanding

Distal Stimulus

An object, event, or pattern as it exists in the world

Proximal Stimulus

Reception of information and its registration by a sense organ (e.g., retinal images in the case of vision).

Percept

The outcome of a perceptual process; the meaningful interpretation of incoming information.

Size Constancy

The phenomenon that one’s perception of an object remains constant even as the retinal image of the object changes size

Pattern Recognition

The classification of a stimulus into a category.

Figure - ground organization

A perceptual segregation of a stimulus into one or more objects of focal interest and background

Subjective Contour

Illusory outline created by certain visual cues that lead to erroneous form perception.

Emergence in Perception

A perceptual phenomenon in which qualitative differences that appear in parts of a stimulus are added, so that whole stimuli take on novel, unpredictable properties.

Configural Superiority Effect CSE

perception of the “odd stimulus out” is faster in the composite stimulus display than in the base stimulus display

Bottom - Up Processing ( Data Driven)

Perceiver starts with small bits of environmental information and combines them to form a perception.

Top-Down Processing ( theory or conceptually driven)

The perceiver’s expectations, theories, or concepts guide the selection and combination of the information in the pattern recognition process

Template Matching

process of perception involves comparing incoming information with the templates we have stored and looking for a match.

Featural Analysis

Biederman suggested that when people view objects, they segment them into simple geometric components called geons ( A simple geometric component hypothesized to be used in the recognition of objects)

Categorical Perception

The classification of sounds that vary on an acoustic dimension continuously into discrete categories.

Prototype matching

a cognitive process where people identify, categorize, or evaluate new stimuli by comparing them to an idealized "prototype" or average mental model of a category, rather than looking for an exact match

Context or Expectation Effect

Issue with the bottom model that argues that the context or expectations can change cognitive processing.

Perceptual Learning

The changes in perception that occur as a function of practice or experience with the stimuli

Word Superiority Effect

Letters are easier to perceive in a familiar context ( word) than an unfamiliar context or in no context.

Connectionist model of word perception

explains how we recognize written or spoken words through networks of simple, interconnected processing units, operating much like neurons in the brain

Face Perception

Done using a holistic gestalt process.

Constructivist Approach to Perception

a process requiring the active construction of subjective mental representations not only from perceptual information but also from long-term memory

Direct Perception

Information in the world is “picked up on” by the cognitive processor without much construction of internal representations or inferences. The emphasis is on direct acquisition of information.

Affordance

The thing offered by the enviornment to the organism

Visual Agnosias

Impairments in the ability to interprest visual information

Apperceptive Agonisa

Process a very limited amount of visual information( see contours, outlines but have difficulty categorizing)

Prosopagnosia

Unable to recognize faces, associated with damage to the right hemisphere.