Untitled Flashcards Set

Selective Attention - focusing conscious awareness on a particular stimulus

Inattentional Blindness - failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere

Change Blindness - failing to notice changes in the environment

Perceptual Set - a mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another

Gestalt - an organized whole; emphasizes our tendency to integrate pieces of information into meaningful wholes

Figure-Ground - the organization of the visual field into objects that stand out from their surroundings

Grouping  - the perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into coherent groups

Depth Perception - the ability to see objects in three dimensions, although the images that strike the retina are two-dimensional; allows us to judge distance

Visual Cliff - a laboratory device for testing depth perception in infants and young animals

Binocular Cue - a depth cue that depends on the use of two eyes

Convergence - a cue to nearby objects’ distance, enabled by the brain combining retinal images

Retinal Disparity - a binocular cue for perceiving depth

Monocular Cue - a depth cue available to either eye alone

Stroboscopic Movement - an illusion of continuous movement experienced when viewing a rapid series of slightly varying still images

Phi Phenomenon - an illusion of movement created when two or more adjacent lights blink on and off in quick succession

Autokinetic Effect - the illusory movement of a still spot of light in a dark room

Perceptual Constancy - perceiving objects as unchanging even as illumination and retinal images change

Color Constancy - perceiving familiar objects as having consistent color, even if changing illumination alters the wavelengths reflected by the object

Perceptual Adaptation - the ability to adjust to changed sensory input, including an artificially displaced or even inverted visual field