3. Perception and Awareness Flashcards
Blindsight
Seeing without perceiving. Patients claim they can’t sense anything somewhere, but throw a ball or have them guess, and they’ll guess with startling accuracy.
Subliminal perception
When a person doesn’t perceive a stimulus, but it still affects their behaviour.
Backwards masking
A technique to study subliminal perception, where you show one stimulus, and then mask it with another. Then
Priming
The tendency for an initial stimuli to make subsequent responses to later related stimuli more likely.
Dissociation paradigm
A strategy to show that perception without awareness is possible.
Objective and subjective thresholds
The point at which participants can no longer perceive a stimulus, and the point at which they claim they can no longer perceive the stimulus.
Process dissociation procedure:
A process that requires participants not to respond to stimuli they haven’t seen before.
SUMMARY: PERCEPTION WITHOUT AWARENESS
First we saw
Topological breakage
Noticing a break in the pattern and recognizing that it points to the connection between two surfaces
Gradient of texture density.
Noticing that those parallelograms are all actually rectangles, and their current shape gives you information about their orientation in space.
Scatter reflection
Using the quality of reflected light to infer the surface’s texture.
Optic flow field
Things closer move faster than things further away. As you travel, you notice some things move slower, and thus are further away.
Template matching theory
That we have templates in our brains and life is about matching things to them.
But how are templates defined?
And wouldn’t we have an incredible number of them? This solution is not elegant.
Hintzman’s Multiple memory trace model
Reminiscent of that CoD Blackops countdown. Every time we see something, it imprints on us
Feature detection theory
Also known as Selfridge’s Pandemonium model. There are feature demons, which look for shapes.
Then there are cognitive demons, which look for patterns
Then there are decision demons, which select the cognitive demon that’s shouting the loudest.
Biederman’s Geon theory
The theory that we break objects up into shapes - geons, 38 of them.
But there are some cases where more detail makes it easier to recognize shapes, so what’s going on?
Principle of proximity
We tend to group together things that are close together
Principle of closed form
We group together items that create a surface
Principle of good contour
Visual items that make a nice shape are grouped together
Principle of similarity
Similar shapes are grouped together.
Principle of common movement
When things stay together and stuff.
FINAL SUMMARY
First we saw blindsight. Seeing without perceiving. Then we went one level up, by looking at perception without awareness. Then we went one level up with theories of pattern recognition: template matching theory, feature detection theory, geon theory, and gestalt theory.
