Studied by 0 people
Brain and Cognition
Retina
A thin layer that covers the inside of the back of the eye, which is sensitive to light. Three layers of neurons: rods and cones, bipolar cells, and ganglion cells.
Fovea
Small area which provides our most accurate, precise vision.
Sensation
The reception of stimulation from the environment and its encoding in the nervous system.
Perception
The process of interpreting and understanding sensory information.
Saccades
Eyes sweep from one point to another in fast movements.
Fixations
Eye-movements are interrupted by pauses.
Change blindness
The failure to notice changes in visual stimuli when those changes occur during a saccade.
Inattention blindness
The failure to see an object we are looking at directly because attention is directed elsewhere.
Visual persistence
Apparent persistence of a visual stimulus beyond its physical duration.
Visual sensory memory / iconic memory
Temporary visual buffer that holds visual information for brief periods of time.
Span of apprehension
The number of items recallable after any short display.
Whole report condition
People are to report any letters they can (in Sperling’s research).
Partial report condition
People are to report only the rows (in Sperling’s research).
Icon
The contents of iconic memory often are called the icon, the visual image that resides in iconic memory.
Decay
Forgetting as a passive process like fading
Interference
Forgetting caused by the effects of intervening stimulation or mental processing. (For example, a musician finds it hard to memorize an old song because he/she has learned a new one)
Backward masking
A later visual stimulus interferes with the memory for the prior stimulus.
Focal attention
Neisser’s term for the mental process of visual attention.
Trans-saccadic memory
The memory that is used across a series of eye movements.
Gestalt grouping principles
These principles identify those characteristics of perception in which ambiguities in a stimulus are resolved to help determine which objects are present.
Figure-ground
Gestalt grouping principle, in which one part of the image is treated as the foreground.
Closure
Gestalt grouping principle, in which a person ‘closes up’ an image with gaps.
Proximity
Gestalt grouping principle, elements that are near to one another tend to be grouped together
Similarity
Gestalt grouping principle, elements that are visually similar are grouped together.
Good continuation
Gestalt grouping principle, assumes that when an edge is interrupted, people assume that is continues along regular fashion.
Common fate
Gestalt grouping principle, assumes that entities that move together are also grouped together.
Templates
Stored models of all categorizable patterns.
Feature detection / feature analysis
A very simple visual element that can appear in combination with other features. (For example: \ / - | ( 0 ))
Pandemonium model
Selfridge’s model about little demons who shout out loud as they try to identify patterns.
Beta movement
Mental perception of illusory movement.
Phi phenomenon
When iconic memory receives visual images in relatively close proximity in space and time, it will infer virtual movement.
Bottom-up, data driven processing system
Processing is driven by the stimulus pattern, the incoming data.
Conceptually driven effects
Context and higher level knowledge influence lower-level processes. (For example, not seeing the mistake in typograpical while reading a text)
Context
Surrounding information and one’s own knowledge.
Repetition blindness
The tendency to not perceive a pattern , whether a word, a picture, or any other visual stimulus, when it is quickly repeated.
Connectionist modeling
A computational approach that is often used in cognitive science. It involves a massive number of mathematical computations. It consists of three levels: input units (receive input from environment), hidden units (internal), and output units (reporting response).
RSVP model
A method for bypassing eye movements during reading.
PDP model
Model for recognizing four-letter words.
RBC (recognition by components) theory
A theory that explains object recognition. According to this theory, we are able to recognize objects by separating them into geons.
Geons
Simple three-dimensional geometric forms.
Excitatory
Inhibitory
Embodied perception
Agnosia
Failure or deficit in recognizing objects.
Prosopagnosia
A disruption of face recognition.
Apperceptive agnosia
A form of visual agnosia: a disruption in perceiving patterns.
Associative agnosia
A form of visual agnosia: person cannot associate the pattern with meaning. Image: a person is able to copy the line drawing, even though they cannot recognize what they drew.
Audition
Sense of hearing
Echoic memory / auditory sensory memory
Brief memory system that receives auditory stimuli and preserves them for some amount of time.
Three-eared man
The effect of vocalization
Duration of echoic memory is longer than iconic memory.
Modality effect
Superior recall of the end of the list when heard instead of seen.
Suffix effect
Inferior recall of the end of the list in the presence of an additional, meaningful, nonlist auditory stimulus.
Problem of invariance
The sounds of speech are not invariant from one to the next.
Phoneme
Language sound
