Chapter 3: Perception Flashcards
Visual Agnosia
You can’t identify objects visually, but you can identify them using other senses, e.g. you are in a hospital bed and somebody asks you to identify objects they are holding but you can’t until you reach out and grab one [and with the sense of touch] realize it’s a hairbrush.
Blindsight
Condition coming from damage to the primary visual cortex that causes the patient to make accurate judgements/descriptions about an objects [in their blind area]; the patients feel that they are just guessing these descriptions, but they are able to see it, they are just not conscious of it.
Peception
The process of sensory information producing a conscious awareness of it and have meaning, guiding our actions in the world.
Encoding
The process of transformation sensory information into 1 or more meaningful representations, e.g. you hear sound (words) –> acoustic sound waves (or “events”) hit ear –> brain encodes these waves as words. It is an automatic process.
Subliminal Perception
AKA, unconscious perception; occurs when an observer is not aware of a stimulus but is still perceiving it, having an impact on his/her behaviour.
Stimulus
An entity of the external environment that can be perceived by the observer.
Limen
AKA, threshold; refers to the infix in “subliminal”, meaning that a subliminal perception is below our threshold of being able to perceive.
Backward Masking
When you present a stimulus (or “the target”) to a subject, then show it again, but have it be “masked” by another stimulus.
Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA)
Time between presenting the first, “target” stimulus and the second “masked” stimulus.
Priming
The phenomenon where the presentation of a stimulus causes a thought of a related-stimulus. Marcel (1974): flashed a word, then had a masking pattern appear, then asked subjects what they saw. Subjects reported words that were related, but not the stimulus itself (ex. being flashed “king” and the subjects report “queen) - all about the SEMANTICS.
Direct vs. Indirect Measures
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Dissociation Paradigm
Experimental designs that support “Perception Without Awareness” phenomena, ex. Subliminal perception tasks.
Perception Without Awareness
A phenomena that we can perceive a stimulus without being consciously aware of it.
Objective Threshold
The point at which subjects can detect a stimulus by CHANCE, being “no better than a blind observer”
Subjective Threshold
The point at which subjects say they cannot perceive it, ex. quality of stimulus has such low intensity, presented too quickly, etc.
Process Dissociation Procedure
Experimental method where you ask the subjects to respond to a stimulus (picture, word, sound, etc.) that has NOT been presented; this way they can see what the subjects consciously perceived.
Implicit Perception
The absence of awareness; you’re not realizing that you are perceiving something, yet it will affect your thoughts, experience, and actions.
Percept
Something that is perceived, e.g. loudness, brightness, pleasure, beauty, etc.
Theory of Ecological Optics
Gibson (1961)’s theory that all stimulus information contains energy that hits our sensory organs to accomplish the goal for the stimulus to guide and control our actions.
Ambient Optical Array (AOA)
Visual information that we are able to view.
Gradient of Texture Density
Changes in the pattern on a surface to show a textural change, e.g. the cobblestone density increases (and the cobblestone size decreases) to give the perception they are on a slanted (and farther away).
Topological Breakage
The discontinuity of two different patterns and their intersection with each other; gives useful information about the clear edges of an object.
Scatter-Reflection
How widely light scatters; Gibson (1966) observed that different surfaces reflect light in different ways - a rough surface will reflect incoming light more widely than a smooth surface. This is important because the amount of scatter-reflection tells us about how to perceive the object’s surface.
Transformation
The change in optical information (light) hitting the eye (specifically, the retina) when the observer moves through the environment (e.g. trapezoid can be seen as rectangular)
