Module 16

bottom-up processing starts at your sensory receptors and works up to higher levels of processing.

top-down processing constructs perceptions from this sensory input by drawing on your experience and expectations.

As your brain absorbs the information in bottom-processing enables your sensory systems to detect the lines, angles, and colors that form things and leaves.

Using top-down processing, your interpret what your senses detect.

Through selective attention, our awareness focuses, like a flashlight beam, on a minute aspect of all that we experience. Though we may think we can fully attend to a conversation or a class lecture while checking and return text messages, our consciousness focuses on but one thing at a time.

inattentional blindness-failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere

change blindness- failing to see a change in the environment.

transduction- conversion of one form of energy to another.

psychophysics- the study of relationships between physical characteristics of stimuli.

Gustav Fechner studied the edge of our awareness of these faint stimuli, called absolute thresholds- the minimum stimulation necessary to detect a particular light, sound, pressure.

Erbst Weber- Weber’s Law; for an average person to perceive a perceive a different, two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage (rather than a constant amount)