Chapter 7 Flashcards
What did J.J. Gibson do?
Championed the ecological approach to perception
What is a flaw with the traditional way of studying perception?
Testing with simple stimuli ignores what a person perceives in real life
What is a goal of the ecological approach?
To determine how movement creates perceptual information that helps people move within the environment
What is optic flow?
Movement of an observer creates movement of objects and the scene relative to the observer
What are two important characteristics of optic flow?
Optic flow is more rapid near the moving observer
There is no flow at the destination toward which the observer is moving
What is the gradient of flow?
Fast optic flow near observer, slow optic flow away from observer
Provides information about how fast the observer is moving
What is focus of expansion?
The absence of flow at the destination point
What is invariant information?
Information that remains constant regardless of what the observer is doing or how the observer is moving
What type of information does optic flow provide?
Invariant information because the same flow of information is present each time the observer is moving through the environment in a particular way
What is the relationship between movement and optic flow?
Movement creates optic flow which will provide information for guiding further movement
What was the swinging room experiment?
The floor remained stationary but the walls and ceiling could move back and forth
Most participants compensated for the movement even though they themselves were not moving
Vision can override traditional sources of balance information
What are affordances?
Information that indicates how an object can be used
What did Gibson’s work put an emphasis on?
Studying the acting observer
Identifying invariant information in the environment that observers use for the perception
Considering the senses as working together
Focusing on object affordances
What is an action affordance?
Involves both the object’s affordance and the action associated with it
What is the visual direction strategy?
Keep your body pointed toward your goal
What is spatial updating?
The process of keeping track of your position within the surrounding environment while you move
What is wayfinding?
The navigation in which we take a route that usually involves making turns
What are landmarks?
Objects on a route that serve as cues to indicate when to turn
What are decision-point landmarks?
Objects at corners where participants have to decide which way to turn
What are non-decision-point landmarks?
Objects located in the middle of corridors that provide no critical information about how to navigate
What happens when you remove non-decision-point landmarks?
No effect on performance
What happens when you remove decision-point landmarks?
Drop in performance
What is a cognitive map?
A map in our heads that helps us keep track of where we are
What are place cells?
Neurons that only fire when an animal is in a certain place in the environment
What is a place field?
The area of the environment within which a place cell fires
What are grid cells?
Provide information about the direction of movement
May be able to code distance and direction information as an animal moves
Where are grid cells found?
In an area near the hippocampus called the entorhinal cortex
Arranged in gridlike patterns
What are the differences between bus drivers’ and taxi drivers’ hippocampi?
Taxi drivers had a greater volume in the back of their hippocampus and less volume in the front
What is experience-dependent plasticity?
More experience (driving taxis longer) results in a larger posterior hippocampus
What is a takeaway of wayfinding?
It is multifaceted
Depends on numerous sources of information and is distributed throughout many structures in the brain
What is the parietal reach region?
The area involved in reaching and grasping
What are visuomotor grip cells?
A neuron that responds when preparing to grasp an object and also when that specific object is viewed
Links perception and action
What is proprioception?
The ability to sense body position and movement
What are two additional sources of information as you reach for something?
Proprioceptive information = information about the position of your hand and arm
Corollary discharge signals
What is the size-weight illusion?
A person is asked to lift two weights that are different sizes but the same weight
They will lift the large weight higher and will say it feels lighter because they are expecting it to be heavier based on its size = they exert more force lifting it
What do simple every day actions depend on?
Constant interactions between sensory and motor components of the nervous system and constant prediction of what’s gonna happen next
What are mirror neurons?
Neurons that respond both when a monkey observes someone else grasping an object and when the monkey itself grasps the object
What are audiovisual mirror neurons?
Neurons in the premotor cortex that respond when a monkey performs a hand action and when it hears the sound associated with that action
What are audiovisual mirror neurons actually responding to?
What is happening as opposed to a specific pattern or movement
Where are mirror neurons found in the human brain?
They are distributed through the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes
Network called the mirror neuron system
Where are mirror neurons found in the human brain?
They are distributed through the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes
Network called the mirror neuron system
What else do mirror neurons signal?
Intentions
There is a difference in firing from watching someone pick up a cup to drink out of versus picking it up to throw it out
What do mirror neurons help us understand?
Communications based on facial expression
Emotional expressions
Gestures, body movements, and mood
The meanings of sentences
Differences between ourselves and others
Guiding social interactions
What disorder may abnormal functioning of mirror neurons be associated with?
Autism
What is the action-specific perception hypothesis?
People perceive their environment in terms of their ability to act on it
What are a couple of characteristics of prediction?
We are usually not conscious of their operation
They operate extremely rapidly
