Selective attention:

• Our tendency to focus on just a particular stimulus among the many that are being received

• Although we are surrounded by sights and sounds, smells and tastes, we tend to pay attention to only a few at a time

• Your short-term memory can only hold a few things in it at a time so you must select what you want to process from all of the information coming into your STM

• We sense 11,000,000 bits of information per second, consciously only process 40 bits per second

• Cocktail party effect: 

  • You focus your attention on one particular voice amidst the crazy loudness of all those other voices

• Inattentional Blindness:

  • Failing to see visible objects when our attention of focus is directed elsewhere

• Change Blindness:

  • Failing to notice changes in the visual environment

• How we perceive the world is based on combination of context, expectations, & cultural effects

  • Our bias to perceive some aspects of stimuli and ignore others can be influenced by our expectations, emotions, motivation and culture.

  • Our mood and circumstances can sometimes create errors in top down processing. This is emotional context can affect perception

  • Expectations also affect perception

  • Cultural expectations affect perceptions as well/ not all cultures perceive the same stimuli in the same way.

Subliminal Stimuli

• Not detectable 50% of the time; therefore they are below your absolute threshold

• May not notice at all if they are weak

• Types of Messages:

  • Flashing on screen so quickly you can’t perceive it, but you still see it (below the sensory perception threshold)

  • Play it backwards

  • Embedding it into another image

  • Playing it at a low-volume masked over by other music or sounds

• This doesn’t work really outside the laboratory

Perceptual Set

• Expectations of a particular environment; Tendency to perceive or notice some aspects of the available sensory data and ignore others

• Top Down Processing - you go beyond the sensory information to try to make meaning out of ambiguity in your world

• What you expect (your experiences and your perceptual set) drives this process

• Extrasensory Perception

  • Clairvoyance - awareness of an unknown object or event

  • Telepathy - knowledge of someone else’s thoughts or feelings

  • Precognition - foreknowledge of future events

  • Research can been unable to conclusively demonstrate existence of ESP

• Ganzfeld Procedure

  • All sensory information reduced

  • “Receiver” in reclining chair in sound proof chamber with ping-pong balls, red light, earphones and white noise

  • In separate room “

Gestalt Psychology

• Proximity:

• Similarity:

• Continuity:

• Closure:

• Area: 

• Symmetry: 

Figure-Ground: refer to the ability to distinguish an object from its surroundings

Binocular depth cue: visual info that requires both eyes to perceive depth and distance; help us perceive the world in 3 dimensions 

Retinal Disparity: when each eye sees a slightly different picture because of their separate positions on your face

Convergence: when our eyes move forward toward each other to focus on a close object; aids in perception of death

Monocular Depth Cues: visual indicators of distance and space that can be perceive how far away things are (depth)

Relative Clarity: a depth cue where objects that are clearer and more detailed are perceived as closer; while objects that are hazier and less clear seem farther away

Relative Size: a visual cue where objects closer to us appear large, while objects away appear smaller

Texture Gradient: the way we perceive texture to become denser . .. . . . . . 

Linear perspective: a depth cue where parallel lines appear to converge as they recede into the distance

Interposition: when one object overlaps another, leading us to perceive the overlapping object as closer

Relative Motion: Objects closer to a fixation point move faster and in opposing direction to those objects that are farther away from a fixation point, moving slower and in the same direction

Perceptual Constancies: our brain’s ability to see objects as unchanging, even when …………………