4.1 psychophysics and gestalt psychology Flashcards
sensory organs
give us the raw material that we need to understand the world through their sensitivity to different types of energy
these organs then send info about that that energy to the brain, which performs further processing
perception
the next step of organizing and coming to a meaningful understanding of the info sent by the sensory organs
transduction
the process of converting basic sensory info into neural activity that the brain can interpret
doctrine of specific nerve energies
proposed by Johannes Muller, 1826
in order to keep organization of our 5 senses, signals from our sensory input are sent to different brain areas, separate brain areas are specialized for different sensory input is called the doctrine of specific nerve energies
Orienting responses
occur when surprising and new events capture our attention
sensory adaptation
we are set up to devote less attention to very familiar stimuli
(ex. we experience adaptation as boredom when engaging in repetitive, routine activities)
psychophysics
gustav fechner
methods for investigating what humans can sense from their environment
-seeks to measure the relationship b/w the energy detected by our sensory organs and our psychological experience of that energy
absolute threshold
the minimum amount of energy or amount of a stimulus that we can detect at least 50% of the time
difference threshold
the smallest difference b/w stimuli we can detect at least 50% of the time
AKA just noticeable difference (JND)
weber’s / fechnerk’s law
differences in intensity are more difficult to detect at higher intensities
signal detection theory
considers both the amount of stimulation that people receive with their personal threshold for reporting the presence of a stimulus or a change in stimulus intensity
-generates 4 different outcomes
stimulus present and you saw it
hit
stimulus present and you didn’t see it
miss
stimulus absent and you saw it
false alarm
stimulus absent and you didn’t see it
correct rejection
sensation
the process that our sensory organs perform when they receive information about the world around us, this is the earliest possible step in allowing us to know how to respond effectively to events
structuralism
focused on the elementary units of perception…which is like focusing on the separate lines that form a connect the dots image
gestalt psychology
- insisted that perception is far more than simply the component parts that go into it
- the idea that something more than the parts emerges out of the way that we organize perceptual features
- origin of motion pictures and animation
- we infer non-existent motion when the images of the two circles are presented repeatedly and close together in time
figure-ground principle
we use the visual features of objects to determine which are the objects in our environment and what parts are the background
-what we perceive as figure vs. ground depends on how we organize visual features
faces/goblet example
law of similarity
grouping objects together according to features they have in common
law of proximity
grouping objects together according to their closeness in space
law of continuity
grouping features together when some part of them is obscured by another object
law of closure
we infer that features with pieces missing belong to the same object if the features of the object are consistent for that type of inference
bottom up processing
perception that derives from sensory inputs
top down processing
perception that derives from our prior experiences and expectations
-is to blame for misunderstandings
divided attention
attention to multiple sources of input
-divided attention is okay if the all the sources are fairly simple
(ex chew gum, walk, and plan evening)
selective attention
won’t be aware of any other source of info
ex. studying, performance is best if you focus only on this task
con. might miss out on stuff going around them
inattentional blindness
when focused on another aspect of the scene, people can even fail to notice a gorilla passing through
