perception week 9

9.1


9.2 (wed)

  • proprioception - perception of the position of our limbs

  • kinesthesis - perception of the movement of our limbs

  • 3 types of cells in both

    • muscle spindles

    • joint receptors

    • golgi tendon organs

  • muscle spindles - cells in muscle connected to receptors that detect stretch of muscle

  • joint receptors - receptors in joint that sense information about angle of joint

  • golgi tendon organs - receptors in tendons that measure force of muscle contraction (relaxed, stretched, contracted)

  • vestibular sense - perception of balance

    • crista - sensory organ of rotation

      • located in semicircular canals

      • contains hair cells that detect movement of fluid through canals

    • benign paroxysmal positional vertigo

      • calcium carbonate crystals get dislodged and float through semicircular canals

      • causes movement of spinning that isn’t happening

    • VR sickness - theory explains VR sickness may be result of incongruent info from visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive systems


  • multimodality - don’t just use one sense at a time

  • multimodal perception - perception relating to 1 or more sensory processes

  • our senses

    • audition, cutaneous senses, body position senses, olfaction, gustation, vision

  • superadditive effect of multisensory integration

    • the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

    • hearing and seeing someone speak is more stimulating than either modality alone

    • superior colliculus - receives input from multiple sensory areas (visual, auditory, motor, somatosensory)

    • sum of reactions to unimodalcomponents of a multimodal stimulus is less than the overall reaction to the whole multimodal stimulus

  • multimodal integration is more likely when":

    • multimodal stimuli arise from about same location and occur around same time

  • multimodal effects and phenomena

    • audition x vision

      • ventriloquism

      • double flash illusion - 1 flash 1 beep vs. 1 flash 2 beeps

    • touch x vision

      • rubber hand illusion

    • olfaction x others

      • wine smelling experiment - ask people what the wine smells like when both are white wines, one is just died red. some say red color wine smells like prune while white smells like honey, citrus

    • gustation x others

      • dining aesthetics

        • food on white plate instead of black plate tastes sweeter

  • synesthesia - when sensations in one modality are experienced simultaneously in another modality or cognitive activity

    • experiences must be highly specific, automatic, and fixed over time

    • associative synesthesia - feels a very strong and involuntary association between inducer and concurrent

    • projective synesthesia - actually sees, hears, smells, experiences concurrent when presented with the inducer

    • types - grapheme/color, number/form, sound/color, number/personality, etc (there’s a gazillion more)

  • synesthesia comes from development and experience

  • synesthesia-like phenomena

    • trypophobia

      • texture and emotion

    • misophonia

      • sound and emotion

    • bouba and kiki

      • assignment of name to abstract shapes

  • synesthesia is a spectrum - everyone is a bit synesthetic