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
