Sensation and perception Flashcards
What is perception in cognitive psychology?
The process by which we acquire awareness of our environment through sensory information.
Is perception a passive or active process?
Active process involving interpretation and organisation.
What role does perception play in cognition?
It is essential for creating memories, acquiring knowledge, solving problems, and communicating.
What is the inverse projection problem?
The challenge of determining the object responsible for a retinal image.
How do humans perceive hidden or blurred objects?
By using knowledge and expectations.
What is viewpoint invariance?
The ability to recognize an object as the same when viewed from different angles.
What are bottom-up and top-down processing?
Bottom-up: sensory receptors to brain. Top-down: brain uses knowledge to interpret sensory information.
What is an example of top-down processing?
Speech segmentation.
What does Helmholtz’s Theory of Unconscious Inference propose?
Perceptions are the result of unconscious assumptions about the environment.
What do the Gestalt Principles of Organization emphasize?
The whole is different than the sum of its parts.
What is the law of pragnanz?
Every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible.
What are regularities in the environment?
Frequent characteristics that occur in the environment, both physical and semantic.
What is Bayesian inference?
A mathematical framework for combining prior beliefs with current sensory evidence.
What is experience-dependent plasticity?
The brain’s ability to adapt based on experience, affecting neuron responsiveness.
What are the ventral and dorsal pathways in the brain?
Ventral: object identification. Dorsal: object location and guiding actions.
What are mirror neurons?
Neurons that fire when performing an action or observing someone else perform that action.
What does the size-weight illusion illustrate?
How predictions can influence perception.
True or False: Perception is entirely a bottom-up process.
False.
Fill in the blank: The dorsal pathway is also known as the ______ pathway.
Where.
According to the Gestalt principle of similarity, ______.
Similar things appear to be grouped together.
What is the primary role of perception?
To enable interaction with the environment.
True or False: Computer vision systems outperform human perception in recognizing blurred objects.
False.
What does the study of patients with brain damage demonstrate?
Dissociation between the ability to perceive and act upon objects.
How does experience influence perceptual abilities?
Through experience-dependent plasticity.
Which discovery supports the idea that perception and action are closely linked?
b) The discovery of mirror neurons
Mirror neurons are thought to play a crucial role in understanding actions and intentions by mirroring the observed behavior.
What is the size-weight illusion an example of?
a) The role of predictions in shaping perception
The size-weight illusion demonstrates how our expectations can influence our perception of weight.
What is the key takeaway from the chapter regarding perception?
c) Perception is influenced by both sensory input and knowledge-based inference
This highlights the interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes in perception.
What does bottom-up processing start with?
Sensory input
Bottom-up processing is driven by external stimuli and does not rely on prior knowledge.
What is the role of top-down processing in perception?
It uses prior knowledge and expectations
Top-down processing helps interpret sensory information based on previous experiences.
What does perceiving separate words in speech depend on?
Experience with a language
Familiarity with a language allows listeners to discern words more easily in continuous speech.
What does the term ‘Pragnanz’ refer to in Gestalt psychology?
Simplicity
Pragnanz suggests that perceptual organization will always be as simple as possible.
Which orientations are more common than oblique ones?
Vertical and horizontal orientations
This observation is rooted in the way visual systems are structured to detect these orientations more readily.
What influences the brain’s adaptation to environmental regularities?
Experience
Experience shapes how the brain processes and interprets sensory information.
What is involved in determining object location and guiding actions?
The ability to process more data than humans
This highlights the complexity of spatial awareness and motor coordination in perception.
What is the challenge of determining the object responsible for a retinal image?
The challenge of determining the object responsible for a retinal image
This refers to the complexity of visual perception and the ambiguity in visual stimuli.
What is the most likely interpretation of a stimulus based on past experiences?
The most likely interpretation of a stimulus based on past experiences
This emphasizes the role of context and memory in perception.
True or False: Computer vision has surpassed human perceptual abilities.
False
While computer vision has made advances, it does not yet match the complexity of human perception.
