3. Perception and Awareness

Question 1

Blindsight

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

Subliminal perception

Answer 2

When a person doesn’t perceive a stimulus, but it still affects their behaviour.

Question 3

Backwards masking

Answer 3

A technique to study subliminal perception, where you show one stimulus, and then mask it with another. Then

Question 4

Priming

Answer 4

The tendency for an initial stimuli to make subsequent responses to later related stimuli more likely.

Question 5

Dissociation paradigm

Answer 5

A strategy to show that perception without awareness is possible.

Question 6

Objective and subjective thresholds

Answer 6

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.

Question 7

Process dissociation procedure:

Answer 7

A process that requires participants not to respond to stimuli they haven’t seen before.

Question 8

SUMMARY: PERCEPTION WITHOUT AWARENESS

Answer 8

First we saw

Question 9

Topological breakage

Answer 9

Noticing a break in the pattern and recognizing that it points to the connection between two surfaces

Question 10

Gradient of texture density.

Answer 10

Noticing that those parallelograms are all actually rectangles, and their current shape gives you information about their orientation in space.

Question 11

Scatter reflection

Answer 11

Using the quality of reflected light to infer the surface’s texture.

Question 12

Optic flow field

Answer 12

Things closer move faster than things further away. As you travel, you notice some things move slower, and thus are further away.

Question 13

Template matching theory

Answer 13

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.

Question 14

Hintzman’s Multiple memory trace model

Answer 14

Reminiscent of that CoD Blackops countdown. Every time we see something, it imprints on us

Question 15

Feature detection theory

Answer 15

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.

Question 16

Biederman’s Geon theory

Answer 16

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?

Question 17

Principle of proximity

Answer 17

We tend to group together things that are close together

Question 18

Principle of closed form

Answer 18

We group together items that create a surface

Question 19

Principle of good contour

Answer 19

Visual items that make a nice shape are grouped together

Question 20

Principle of similarity

Answer 20

Similar shapes are grouped together.

Question 21

Principle of common movement

Answer 21

When things stay together and stuff.

Question 22

FINAL SUMMARY

Answer 22

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.