Chapter 2

Question 1

Perception

Answer 1

The use of previous knowledge to gather and interpret stimuli registered by the senses. Perception requires both bottom-up and top-down processing.

Question 2

Object recognition or pattern recognition

Answer 2

you identify a complex arrangement of sensory stimuli, and you perceive that this pattern is separate from its background.

When you recognize an object, your sensory processes transform and organize raw information provided by your sensory receptors. You also compare the sensory stimuli with information that you have stored in your memory.

Question 3

distal stimulus

Answer 3

is the actual object that is “ out there” in the environment - for example, the pen on your desk.

Question 4

proximal stimulus

Answer 4

is the information registered on your sensory receptors - for example, the image that your pen creates on your retina.

Question 5

retina

Answer 5

covers the inside back portion of your eye; it contains millions of neurons that register and transmit visual information from the outside world.

Question 6

sensory memory

Answer 6

is a large-capacity storage system that records information from each of the senses with reasonable accuracy.

Question 7

iconic memory or visual sensory memory

Answer 7

preserves an image of a visual stimulus for a brief period after the stimulus has disappeared

Question 8

Primary Visual Cortex

Answer 8

is located in the occipital lobe of the brain; it is the portion of your cerebral cortex that is concerned with basic processing of visual stimuli.

Question 9

Gestalt psychology - One Important Principle

Answer 9

Humans have basic tendencies to organize what they see; without any effort, we see patterns rather than random arrangements. For example, when two areas share a common boundary, the figure has a distinct shape with clearly defined edges.

Question 10

figure

Answer 10

has a distinct shape with clearly defined efges

Question 11

ground

Answer 11

is the refion that is “ left over”, forming the background.

Question 12

Ambiguous figure-ground relationship

Answer 12

the figure and the ground reverse from time to time, so that the figure becomes the ground and then becomes the figure again.

Question 13

illusory contours or subjective contours

Answer 13

we see edges even though they are not physically present in the stimulus.

Question 14

templates

Answer 14

specific patterns that you have stored in memory

Question 15

feature-analysis theories

Answer 15

propose a relatively flexible approach in which a visual stimulus is composed of a small number of characteristics or components

Question 16

distinct feature

Answer 16

each visual characteristic

Question 17

recognition-by-components theory

Answer 17

In visual perception, a theory proposing that people can recognize three-dimensional shapes, in terms of an arrangement of simple 3D shapes called geons. Geons can be combined to form meaningful objects.

Question 18

Geons

Answer 18

In recognition-by-components theory, the simple 2D shapes that people use in order to recognize visual objects

Question 19

viewer-centered approach

Answer 19

this approach proposes that we store a small number of views of the three-dimensional objects rather than just one view.

Question 20

Bottom-up processing

Answer 20

emphasizes that the stimulus characteristics are important when you recognize an object. Specifically, the physical stimuli from the environment are registered on the sensory receptors.

Question 21

Top-down processing

Answer 21

emphasizes how a person’s concepts, expectations and memory can influence object recognition.

Question 22

word superiority effect

Answer 22

we can identify a single letter more accurately and more rapidly when it appears in a meaningful word than when it appears alone or in a meaningless string of unrelated letters.

Question 23

change blindness

Answer 23

fail to detect a change in an object or scene

Question 24

inattentional blindness

Answer 24

when we are paying attention to some events in a scene, we may fail to notice when a unexpected but completely visible object suddenly appears/

Question 25

ecological validity

Answer 25

studies are high in ecological validity if the conditions in which the research is conductedare similar to the natural setting where the results will be applied.

Question 26

holistic ( recognition)

Answer 26

A term describing the recognition of faces and other selected stimuli, based on their overall shape and structure, or gestalt.

Question 27

gestalt

Answer 27

overall quality that transcends its individual elements

Question 28

prosopagnosia

Answer 28

condition in which people cannot recognize human faces, though they perceive other objects relatively normally.

Question 29

face-inversion effect

Answer 29

observation that [ep[;e are much more accurate in identifying upright faces, compared to upside-down faces.

Question 30

Schizophrenia

Answer 30

People with schizophrenia typically do not show intense emotions and they may have hallucinations. Another facet is disordered thinking.

Question 31

Speech perception

Answer 31

The process by which the auditory system records sound vibrations that are generated by someone talking. The auditory system then translates these vibrations into a sequence of sounds that are perceived as speech.

Question 32

Phoneme

Answer 32

the basic unit of spoken language, such as the sounds a,k,th,

Question 33

Inter-speaker variability i

Answer 33

s the term used to refer to the observation that different speakers of the same language produce the same sound differently.

Question 34

Coarticulation

Answer 34

One of the causes of phoneme variation, in this case created by surrounding phonemes. Specifically, when pronouncing a particular phoneme, the mouth remains in somewhat the same shape as when it pronounced the previous phoneme; in addition, the mouth is preparing to pronounce the next phoneme.

Question 35

Phonemic restoration

Answer 35

In speech perception, filling in a missing phoneme based on contextual meaning.

Question 36

McGurk effect

Answer 36

The observation that visual information influences speech perception ; listeners integrate both visual and auditory information when perceiving speech.

Question 37

special mechanism approach or speech-is-special approach

Answer 37

humans are born with a specialized device that allows us to decode speech stimuli. As a result, we process speech sounds more quickly and accurately than other auditory stimuli, such as instrumental music.

Question 38

Categorical perception

Answer 38

A phenomenon in which people report hearing a clear cut phoneme even though they actually heard an ambiguous sound, between the two phoneme

Question 39

General Mechanism approach

Answer 39

The idea that speech perception can be explained without proposing any specialized phonetic module. in other words, humans use the same neural mechanisms to process both speech sounds and nonspeech sounds.