Chapter 3: Perception

Question 1

Visual Agnosia

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

Blindsight

Answer 2

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.

Question 3

Peception

Answer 3

The process of sensory information producing a conscious awareness of it and have meaning, guiding our actions in the world.

Question 4

Encoding

Answer 4

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.

Question 5

Subliminal Perception

Answer 5

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.

Question 6

Stimulus

Answer 6

An entity of the external environment that can be perceived by the observer.

Question 7

Limen

Answer 7

AKA, threshold; refers to the infix in “subliminal”, meaning that a subliminal perception is below our threshold of being able to perceive.

Question 8

Backward Masking

Answer 8

When you present a stimulus (or “the target”) to a subject, then show it again, but have it be “masked” by another stimulus.

Question 9

Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA)

Answer 9

Time between presenting the first, “target” stimulus and the second “masked” stimulus.

Question 10

Priming

Answer 10

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.

Question 11

Direct vs. Indirect Measures

Answer 11

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Question 12

Dissociation Paradigm

Answer 12

Experimental designs that support “Perception Without Awareness” phenomena, ex. Subliminal perception tasks.

Question 13

Perception Without Awareness

Answer 13

A phenomena that we can perceive a stimulus without being consciously aware of it.

Question 14

Objective Threshold

Answer 14

The point at which subjects can detect a stimulus by CHANCE, being “no better than a blind observer”

Question 15

Subjective Threshold

Answer 15

The point at which subjects say they cannot perceive it, ex. quality of stimulus has such low intensity, presented too quickly, etc.

Question 16

Process Dissociation Procedure

Answer 16

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.

Question 17

Implicit Perception

Answer 17

The absence of awareness; you’re not realizing that you are perceiving something, yet it will affect your thoughts, experience, and actions.

Question 18

Percept

Answer 18

Something that is perceived, e.g. loudness, brightness, pleasure, beauty, etc.

Question 19

Theory of Ecological Optics

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

Ambient Optical Array (AOA)

Answer 20

Visual information that we are able to view.

Question 21

Gradient of Texture Density

Answer 21

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).

Question 22

Topological Breakage

Answer 22

The discontinuity of two different patterns and their intersection with each other; gives useful information about the clear edges of an object.

Question 23

Scatter-Reflection

Answer 23

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.

Question 24

Transformation

Answer 24

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)

Question 25

Optic Flow Field

Answer 25

The continuously changing pattern of information in the AOA that results from the movement of either the objects or the observer through the environment (e.g. when you’re still in the car and you’re video taping outside and the trees in the background seem to be clearer than the bushes in the foreground on tape - this is because objects that are closer to the observer appear to be moving faster than the objects that are farther away, and it can help us perceive the speed of object motion by understanding the relative distance.

Question 26

Pattern Recognition

Answer 26

The ability to recognize an event as an instance of a particular category of an event, e.g. we see groups of letters as words, not as squiggles, OR, we see a cylindrical object with a handle as a coffee mug.

Question 27

Memory Trace

Answer 27

How a certain experience leaves behind a memory.

Question 28

Hoffding Function

Answer 28

The process where a new experience makes contact with a memory trace: recognition.

Question 29

Prototypical Forms

Answer 29

Something that represents a pattern or category, e.g. different fonts of the letter A

Question 30

.Template-Matching Theory

Answer 30

Process of recognition relies on prototypes/templates, e.g. looking at all these different fonts of A and recognizing that these are all As

Question 31

Multiple-Trace Memory Model

Answer 31

Traces of an individual’s experience are recorded in their memory; no matter how often, a trace of the event is recorded in the memory.

Question 32

Probe

Answer 32

A “snapshot” (general representation of an experience) that can activate our secondary-memory by means of a probe from primary-memory; we activate the SM memory traces.