Perceiving Objects, Scenes and Colour Flashcards
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Achromatic colours
a colour that that lacks hues such as white, grey and black
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Additive colour mixture
the kind of mixing you get if you overlap spotlights in a dark room. The commonly used primary colors of this type are are red, green and blue, and if you overlap all three in effectively equal mixture, you get white light as shown at the center
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Anomalous trichromatism
A form of defective colour vision in which three primary colours are required for colour matching, but the proportion of each primary is not the same as those required by a normal trichromat
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Apparent movement
an optical illusion in which stationary objects viewed in quick succession or in relation to moving objects appear to be in motion
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Base rate
the proportion of individual in the population who show the behaviour of interest in a given psychological testing or assessment situation
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Baysian inference
a method of statistical inference in which Bayes’ theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available
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Binding
process by which features are combined to create perception of coherent objects
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Binding problem
features of objects are processed separately in different areas of the brain
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Cerebral achromaropsia
a type of color-blindness caused by damage to the cerebral cortex of the brain, rather than abnormalities in the cells of the eye’s retina
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Chromatic adaptation
the human visual system’s ability to adjust to changes in illumination in order to preserve the appearance of object colors
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Chromatic colours
Any color in which one particular wavelength or hue predominates. For example, blue and green
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Colour blind
the decreased ability to see color or differences in color
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Colour circle
an abstract illustrative organization of color hues around a circle, which shows the relationships between primary colors, secondary colors, tertiary colors etc.
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Colour constancy
an example of subjective constancy and a feature of the human color perception system which ensures that the perceived color of objects remains relatively constant under varying illumination conditions
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Colour matching
the process of transferring a particular color across different technologies or platforms
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Colour solid
the three-dimensional representation of a color model, an analog of the two-dimensional color wheel
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Complementary afterimages
a case of perception in which one perceives a subset of the colors available in the external world in a stimulus-shaped local area. They are not illusory opponent hues but localized RGB filtered perception.
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Contextual modulation
stimuli outside of a neuron’s receptive field can affect neural firing
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Desaturated
formed by mixing a color of the spectrum with white
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Dichromats
Organisms with two types of functioning color receptors, called cone cells, in the eyes
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Double-opponent neurons
opponent cells that have a center, which is excited by one color and inhibited by the other. In the surround, the pattern is reversed. Thus, if the center is excited by green and inhibited by red, the surround will be excited by red and inhibited by green
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Feature integration theory
a theory of attention developed in 1980 by Anne Treisman and Garry Gelade that suggests that when perceiving a stimulus, features are “registered early, automatically, and in parallel, while objects are identified separately” and at a later stage in processing
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Figure
an object that is in the foreground of a person’s visual range
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Figure-ground segregation
the fact that the figure is perceived to stand out from the background, being bounded by a closed contour, behind which the background appears to continue

