Psych - sensation and perception

Sensation (physical process)

The process by which our sensory receptors & sense organs detect & respond to sensory info, which is an external energy source.

Perception (creating meaning)

A psychological response to sensation, that gives meaning to the stimuli our sense organs detect.

Attention

A voluntary or involuntary tendency to focus awareness on a specific stimulus & ignore another stimuli.

What are the 3 different types of attention:

• sustained attention

• divided attention (multi-tasking)

• selective attention

Sustained attention

Focusing attention on an activity or stimulus over a long period without being distracted by other stimuli

divided attention (multi-tasking)

rapidly switching your awareness between more than 1 source of info so you can perform more than 1 task at the same time

selective attention

choosing to focus your awareness on a specific or limited range of stimuli while ignoring other stimuli

bottom up processing (specific to general)

when our sensory receptors receive sensory info & we don’t rely on prior experience in order to interpret, used when presented with unfamiliar/highly complex stimuli

top down processing (general to specific)

used when the brain starts with an overall perceptual hypothesis about a stimulus & uses context & general knowledge to fill in any blanks

principles of top down processing:

• perception is driven by cognition

• we interpret new info by drawing on what we already know

• the brain makes an “educated guess”

Stroop effect

Is based on our brain automatically recognising things out of ease, it becomes more difficult when we actually have to think about something

Biological factors

Depth cues

• monocular depth cues

• binocular depth cues

Psychological factors

• visual perception principles (gestalt principles)

• perceptual set

• context

• past experience

• memory

Social factors

Culture

Biological factors

Includes physiological, neurological or genetic conditions that affect an individual

Depth perception

The ability to see 3D space & to accurately judge distances using environmental cues

Depth Cues

A variety of internal and external stimuli or process that inform the visual system about the depth of an object or its distance from the observer

What are the 2 types of depth cues?

• Binocular depth cues

• Monocular depth cues