Chapter 2: Visual and auditory Recognition Flashcards
Perception
Uses previous knowledge to gather and interpret the stimuli registered by the senses
Object/pattern recognition
Identifying a complex arrangement of sensory stimuli and perceiving that this pattern is separate from its background
Distal stimulus
The actual object that is, ”out there” in the environment
Proximal stimulus
The information registered on your sensory receptors
What is another name for iconic memory?
Visual sensory memory
Ambiguous figure-ground relationship
The figure and ground reverse from time to time
What are two explanations for figure-ground reversal
1) the neurons in the visual cortex become adapted to one figure
2) people try to solve the visual paradox by alternating between the two reasonable solutions
Illusory/subjective contours
We see edges even though they are not physically present in the stimulus
Templates
Specific patterns that have been stored in memory
Feature-analysis theory
There are several theories that propose a relatively flexible approach, in which a visual stimulus is composed of a small number of characteristics or components
The recognition-by-components Theory
Theory of how humans recognize 3-D shapes; a specific view of an object can be represented as an arrangement of simple 3-D shapes called Geons
Viewer-Centred approach
Proposes that we store a small number of views of three-dimensional objects, rather than just one view
Bottom-up processing
Emphasizes that the stimulus characteristics are important when you recognize an object; physical stimuli are registered on the sensory receptors which are then passed on to higher levels of the perceptual system
Top-down processing
Emphasizes how a persons concepts, expectations, and memory can influence object recognition
Word superiority effect
We can identify a single letter more accurately and more rapidly when it appears in a meaningful word then when it appears alone by itself or else in a meaningless string of unrelated letters
Change blindness
Failure to detect a change in an object or scene
Inattentional blindness
When we are paying attention to some events in a scene, we may fail to notice when an unexpected but completely visible object suddenly appears
We recognize faces on a ______ basic
Holistic, or gestalt
Prosopagnosia
A disability in which people cannot recognize human faces visually though they perceive other objects relatively normally
Face-inversion effect
People are much more accurate in identifying upright faces, compared to upside down faces
Speech perception
Your auditory system must record the sound vibrations generated by someone talking; then the system must translate these vibrations into a sequence of sounds that you perceive to be speech
Phoneme
The basic unit of spoken language
Coarticulation
When you are pronouncing a particular phoneme, your mouth remains in somewhat the same shape it was when you pronounced the previous phoneme; in addition, your mouth is preparing to pronounce the next phoneme
Phonemic restoration
People can fill in a missing phoneme using contextual meaning as a Cue
McGurk effect
Refers to the influence of visual information on speech perception, when individuals must integrate both visual and auditory information
Special mechanism approach
Believes that humans are born with a specialized device that allows us to decode speech stimuli
Phonetic module
A special-purpose neural mechanism that specifically processes all aspects of speech perception
Categorical perception
Hearing a clear-cut sound rather than a sound partway between the two sounds
The general mechanism approaches
Argues that we can explain speech perception without proposing any special phonetic module
What are the 4 important characteristics of speech perception?
- Listeners can impose boundaries between words, even when these words are not separated by silence
- Phoneme pronunciation varies tremendously
- Context allows listeners to fill in some missing words
- Visual cues from the speaker’s mouth help us interpret ambiguous sounds
