Perception and Cognition: Our Gateway To The World

Question 1

What is it meant by minds ‘window’ to the world.

Answer 1

• Collecting and interpreting information about the world
• Outside world: Physical states
• Window: Sensory and processing systems (collecting information)
• Inside World: Mental States

Question 2

What is perception and Cognition?

Answer 2

• How humans experience their environment (senses)
• How humans understand their environment (thoughts)

Question 3

Information Processing Chain

Answer 3

• Start with sensation/ perception which then leads to generation of thoughts and behaviour
  Example of Processing chain:
• Senses (eyes)
• Attention, you see someone moving
• Memory, store as memory
• Action, thinking
  Chain can go bottom up or top down

Question 4

Paradigms Of Information Processing

Answer 4

• Paradigm, is a way of thinking
  ‘Information Processing Paradigm’ for example, viewing your brain as a computer
• Enhanced by the use of computers
• Brain works by; acquisition, processing, storage, recall

Question 5

Collecting information effectively

Answer 5

• Information needs to be collected and stored
• Perceptual bottleneck, lots of info coming in which is condensed meaning less info is coming out
• Perceptual Filters, brain filters and tunes.
• These are the two engineering features of the brain i.e. filtering and condensing

Question 6

How many senses do we have?

Answer 6

• Five senses, sight, touch, hearing, smell, taste
• There are others such as, temperature, pain and balance
• Animals have more such as listening to ultra sound (bats)

Question 7

Sensory Magnetic Field

Answer 7

• Humans use tools to exploit the magnetic field such as compass
• Birds such as swallows use magnetic fields to navigate

Question 8

Echolocation In humans

Answer 8

• Bats use these to fly in the dark
• When you lose a sense often your other senses become stronger.
• For example, some blind people have echolocation as they use their senses to sense objects, they can also use canes

Question 9

Transfer across sensory modalities

Answer 9

Ventriloquism: making noises that look as though they come from the speakers puppet

Synaesthesia: Mixing of senses such as hearing words but seeing colours

Sensory Substitution: Replacing missing sense with another i.e. images being turned into sounds for blind people

Question 10

Plasticity of the brain and perception

Answer 10

• The brain inverts everything i.e. we see an arrow as downwards but our brain inverts this so we see it pointing up.
• Kohler, 1950, Dove Prism. - right and left reversed
• student goes to grab glass but ends up grabbing cactus because reversed also drops glass on floor, tables not there

Question 11

Theories of perception: Gestalt Psychology

Answer 11

• Focus on principles of perceptual organisation
• The whole is more than the sum of the parts
  Koffka triangle, you see the triangle in the centre but the only shape that isn’t there is a triangle.

Question 12

Theories of perception: Direct Perception

Answer 12

• J.J Gibson,
• Bottom up processing
• Use of senses without need of high level representation

Question 13

Theories of perception: Constructivist Approach

Answer 13

• Neisser, Gregory
• Top down approach
• Mind tries to make sense of ambiguous data
• hypotheses & expectations generate specific errors (illusions)
  i.e. seeing an animal in a image

Question 14

Theories of perception: Information Processing Approach

Answer 14

• neuroscientific & computational approach to perception
• Perception is regarded as a data collection engine

receptor, receptive field, filter, representation, illusions, active sensing