Lecture 5 concepts Flashcards
Paradeiola
Seeing a pattern/meaning on a nebulous stimulus when there is not exactly one
Cross-race effect (in-group bias)
People generally find it easier to recognise same-race as compared to cross-race faces. The explanation behind CRE is that people’s greater perceptual experience with same-race versus cross-race faces. According to the Categorization-Individuation Model (CIM), own-group face recognition biases can emerge because people categorise out-group members but individuate in-group members.
Limits in attention
- Change blindness is a phenomenon of attention and visual perception that occurs when a stimulus undergoes a change without this being noticed by its observer
- Selective attention is the fact of focusing on a particular object for some time while simultaneously ignoring distractions and irrelevant information.
- Inattentional blindness occurs when an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight, purely as a result of a lack of attention rather than any vision defects or deficits.
Famous examples: The Invisible Gorilla, the Cocktail Party effect
Sensation
Awareness of stimulus due to stimulation of a sense organ (e.g, eye, ear)
Perception
Organization, identification and interpretation of sensory input (i.e., sensations, sensory data, light, sound waves, etc.) to form a mental image or representation
Gestalt grouping principles
The whole is different than the sum of its parts
- Proximity: grouping stimuli that are near each other
- Continuation: seeing a pattern in groups of stimuli
- Symmetry
- Resemblance
Daniel Schacter’s “Seven sins of memory”
- Transience - Forgetting - Memory fades of time - e.g., forgetting the plot of a movie
- Blocking - forgetting - inability to recall/remember needed information - e.g., failure to recall name of person you meet on the street
- Absentmindedness - forgetting - reduced memory due to lack of attention - e.g., losing your keys or forgetting a lunch date
- Persistence - undesirable - resurgence of unwanted memories - e.g., remembering an embarrassing moment
- Misattribution - distortion - assigning a memory to wrong source - e.g., thinking person A said this while it was actually person B
- Bias - distortion - influence of current knowledge on memory for past events - e.g., remembering past attitudes as current even though they have changed
- Suggestibility - distortion - altered memory due to misleading information - e.g., developing false memories
Misinformation effect (Loftus)
Occurs when a person’s recall of episodic memories becomes less accurate because of post-event (mis)information
Loftus & Palmer (1974) Car crash experiment
RQ: Can post-event information affect an eyewitness’s account using visual imagery and wording of questions in relation to eyewitness testimony?
Experiment 1: participants were shown videos of car crashes. Then asked ‘how fast were the cars going when they (smashed/collided/bumped/hit/contacted) each other? => different phrasing was used every time to see the effects
Explanations for results:
1) Response bias due to verbs (e.g., smash instead of hit)
2) Altered memory representation: the critical verbs actually change a person’s perception of severity of accident that is stored in memory
Experiment2 : Show another group of participants a clip of a car driving on a country road. Then show 4 seconds of a car crash.
Group 1: “How fast when the car smashed…”
Group 2: “How fast when the car hit…”
Group 3: No question asked.
One week later, question was asked “Did you see any broken glass?” (There was no broken glass on the original film).
Findings: participants who were asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed were more likely to report seeing broken glass.
Conclusion: memory is easily distorted by questioning technique and information acquired after the event (post-event information)
