Unit 2

Perception

  • Sensation: Receiving stimuli by touch, sight, and hearing.

  • Perception: Interpreting sensory information.

  • Ways to Process

    • Bottom-up processing: Processing entirely new information.

    • Top-down processing: Processing information based on previous knowledge and experience.

  • Gestalt Rules: Stimuli are perceived in their totality, grouped by…

    • Proximity:

    • Similarity: People group shapes, objects or design elements by similarities in color, shape, orientation, texture or size.

    • Closure: The human brain has a natural tendency to visually close gaps in forms.

    • Continuity: Shapes, objects or design elements that are positioned in a way that suggests lines, curves or planes will be perceived as such.

    • Figure-ground: Visual scenes are usually separated into a “figure” and the “ground.”

  • Depth Perception: Awareness of three-dimensionality, solidity, and the distance between the observer and the object.

    • Retinal disparities: Different in the distances from an object to either eye; binocular cues.

      • Binocular cue: Uses two eyes together.

    • Visual clarity: How clear an object is; monocular cue.

      • Monocular cue: Available to either eye individually.

    • Interposition: When two objects are in the same line of vision and the closer object, which is fully in view, partly conceals the farther object; monocular cue.

  • Principles of Perception

    • Perceptual Set: Schema that influences the way in which a person perceives objects, events, or people.

    • Context Effects: Perception can change based on context.

    • Schema: Basic knowledge that serves as a guide to perception.

    • Selective attention: Conscious awareness focuses on a limited aspect of stimuli

      • Change blindness: Inability to see differences in an environment.

      • Choice blindness: Inability to establish reasoning for a decision.

    • Motion perception

      • Motion parallax: Closer moving objects seem faster than farther objects

    • Perceptual constancy

  • Thinking as Cognition

    • Schema assimilation: Adding new info into a schema.

    • Schema accommodation: Changing a schema.

  • Cognition: Mental activity associated with processing, understanding, and communicating information

    • Concept: Schema

    • Prototype: A person’s go-to example of a concept.

    • Problem-solving methods

      • Trial & Error: Attempting various solutions.

      • Algorithm: A systematic procedure; always finds the answer.

      • Heuristic: A mental shortcut using intuition and experience.

      • Insight Learning: Breaking down a problem to gain sudden understanding and arrive at a solution; an “aha” moment.

    • Creativity: Coming up with new ways to solve problems; divergent thinking.

    • Fallacies

      • Functional fixedness: Only seeing an object for its intended purpose.

      • Confirmation bias*

      • Hindsight bias*

      • Overconfidence bias: Overestimating one’s ability.

      • Availability heuristics: Basing judgements on readily available information.

      • Representative heuristics: Basing judgements on past experiences and expectations of what should happen.

      • Belief perseverance: Believing in something despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

  • Memory

    • Ways

      • Effortful processing: memory that requires effort

      • Automatic processing: memory that is automatic

      • Ways to encode information

        • Rehearsal: Repeating or practicing something

        • Spacing effect: Spacing out sessions encodes

        • Serial position effect: The first and last items in a group are easiest to remember

          • Primacy effect: The first things are easier to remember

          • Latency effect: The last things are easier to remember 

      • Deep processing: paying attention and giving personal meaning

      • Shallow processing: not paying attention or giving personal meaning

      • Selective attention: choosing to focus on one thing

      • Divided attention: focusing on multiple things; reduces ability

      • Metacognition: Thinking about thinking

    • Systems

      • Sensory memory: Based on senses (iconic, echoic)

      • Short-term memory: Temporary holding place for info used currently; held for 20-30 seconds

      • Long-term memory: Holding place for info over long periods of time

        • Explicit/declarative memory: Conscious recall

          • Semantic memory:

          • Episodic memory:

        • Implicit memory: Unconscious recall

          • Procedural memory: Motor skills

          • Emotional memory: s

      • Stress negatively affects our ability to remember information

      • Emotion can sear memories

      • Parts of the brain:

        • Frontal lobe (thinking)

        • Hippocampus (encoding)

        • Cerebellum (voluntary muscle control)

    • Encoding methods

      • Mnemonics: Devices that assist in learning. 

      • Chunking: Grouping similar information into easily manageable chunks 

      • Keyword method: Using images to identify a definition

      • Metal imagery: using mental images to explain something

      • The Method of Loci: Creating mind areas to store information

      • Link method: Linking information to a story

    • Retrieval

      • Recall: most basic form of retrieval; given stimulus

      • Recognition: familiarity experienced when one encounters people, events, or objects that have been encountered befor

      • Relearning: reintegrating previously learned information; faster second time

      • Retrieval cues: context clues that help pull information from memories

      • Mood congruency: “Emotive” memories match the emotion experienced

      • Encoding specificity principle: encode information as close to retrieving it as possible

    • Forgetting & Memory distortion

      • Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve

        • “Unless we take steps to encode information, we will forget it quickly.”

      • Memories are difficult to retrieve because we lost information

      • Memory issues

        • Proactive interference: Old memories interfere with retrieving new memories.

        • Retroactive interference: New memories interfere with retrieving old memories.

        • Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: having surrounding information but not the actual name

        • Source amnesia: forgetting the source of some information

        • Retrograde amnesia: forgetting old memories

        • Anterograde amnesia: forgetting new memories

      • Memory issues

        • Time

        • traumatic experiences can be seared or forcibly forgotten

  • Intelligence

    • Intelligence: the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situation

      • A concept, not a trait

    • Theories

      • General Intelligence (g): Thought intelligence was a general factor behind all our mental ability

        • Charles Spearman

      • 8 Multiple Intelligences: Intelligence comes in 8 forms

        • Howard Gardener

        • Linguistic - Logical - Visual - Musical - Intra-personal - Kinesthetic - Inter-personal - Naturalistic

      • 3 Multiple Intelligences: Intelligence comes in 3 forms

        • Robert Sternberg

        • Analytical - Creative - Practical

      • Emotional Intelligence: understanding other people’s emotions

    • Measuring intelligence

      • Brain size reflects more synapses and grey matter

      • Figures w/ intelligence testing

        • Alfred Binet: “father of int testing”

          • IQ = 100 * (Mental age)/(chronological age)

          • Average IQ is 100

        • William Stern: created IQ

        • Lewis Terman: created the Stanford Binet Test

        • David Weschler: made WAIS and WISC

      • Two types of intelligence tests:   

        • Aptitude tests: Tests of what someone can learn

        • Achievement tests: Tests of what someone has learned

      • Issues with intelligence tests

        • Prejudice

      • Principles of Test Construction

        • Standardization: same format, timeframe, and other key qualities

        • Reliability: receiving the same range of scores with similar populations on different testing dates

        • Validity: the test measures what it aims to measure

        • Flynn Effect: each generation (generally) becomes more intelligent