Accuracy and Inaccuracy in Perception

sensory interaction… the working together of different senses to create experience

The McGurk effect … is an error in perception that occurs when we misperceive sounds because the audio and visual parts of the speech are mismatched

Another important perceptual process is selective attention… the ability to focus on some sensory inputs while tuning out others

• like the gorilla video

The cocktail party phenomenon… is the experience of being at a party and talking to someone in one part of the room when suddenly you hear your name being mentioned. This shows us that although selective attention is limiting what we process, we are nevertheless simultaneously doing a lot of unconscious monitoring of our environment.

Sensory adaption… is a second fundamental process of perception and is a decreased sensitivity to a stimulus after prolonged and constant exposure.

• Ex). when you step into a swimming pool, the water feels cold initially, but after a while, you stop noticing it. This is our ability to adapt to things that don’t change around us and is essential to our survival.

Our eyes are constantly flitting from one angle to the next, making thousands of tiny movements called …saccades every minute

• this constant eye movement guarantees that the image we a reviewing always falls on fresh receptor cells.

One of the major problems in perception is to ensure that we always perceive the same object in the same way, even when the sensations is creates on our receptors change dramatically

• the ability to perceive a stimulus as constant despite changes in sensation in known as perceptual constancy