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Environmental Psychology > Unit 2 - Perception and Cognition > Flashcards

Unit 2 - Perception and Cognition Flashcards

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0
Q

Environmental perception

A
  • Initial gathering of information

- How we collect information through all our senses.

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1
Q

What is the Weber-Fechner law?

A
  • Just-noticeable-difference between two stimuli is proportional to the magnitude of the stimuli

Remember the noise example - if you’re already in a noisy environment, it takes a lot of noise for you to notice an increase in noise. An increase of a little bit of noise won’t register with you.

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2
Q

What is a “way of seeing”?

A

Our education and training teaches us to look at environments from a particular perspective. Tailors naturally look at the way people’s clothes are cut, engineers look at bridges differently than other people do, real estate agents look at houses from a different perspective than the rest of us

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3
Q

Spatial cognition

A
  • Acquisition, organization, utilization, and revision of knowledge about spatial environments.
  • Allows humans to manage basic and high-level cognitive tasks
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4
Q

What is the terrestrial saucer effect?

A

This is an illusion created by the juxtaposition of mountains in a natural landscape which can lead to rivers appearing to run uphill or roads which actually incline upwards appearing to be sloped downwards. It leads mountain climbers to believe that neighbouring mountain peaks equal in altitude to their own are much higher than their own.

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5
Q

How do we under and over estimate distances?

A

We make clusters out of locations and these clusters affect our ability to judge distance. We underestimate distances between locations within clusters, but overestimate the distances between locations across separate clusters

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6
Q

Brunswik’s Probabilistic Functionalism

A
  • The perceiver and the environment are important - both have to be seen as systems, each with properties of their own.
  • The environment offers a multitude of cues; the perceiver must make sense of the most important ones to function effectively in a setting; this is why Brunswik is a functionalist
  • Organisms actually select the cues that are useful for response and that the truth of perceptions should be considered only probabilistic and not certain
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7
Q

Probabilism

A
  • No singe cue is a perfectly reliable or unreliable clue to the true nature of the environment
  • Each has a certain probability of being accurate
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8
Q

Cue utilization

A
  • Part of Brunswik’s probabilistic functionalism

- The probably weights given to each cue by the perceiver, whether the cue is valid or not

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9
Q

What is multidimensional scaling?

A
  • Ask research participants for inter-place distance judgment
  • Analyze with a statistical procedure
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10
Q

What is a sketch map

A
  • Representation of what is stored in the head
  • Limited in its accuracy by drawing ability, stage of development, memory, and problems with translating a place onto a piece of paper
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11
Q

What is social legibility?

A
  • The meaning of an environmental element varies in different cultures
  • Results in the same place having different legibility for different people
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12
Q

What is a cognitive map?

A

We retrieve small parts of our information base when we draw maps or give directions.

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13
Q

Egocentric Stage of Life

A
  • Child’s stage of development
  • Believe they are the centre of the universe
  • Perceive things based on whether or not they can touch it, how close they are to it, and whether or not it is part of them
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14
Q

Child’s Projective Stage

A
  • Adopting perspectives from viewpoints other than their own

- Children can orient themselves using major landmarks.

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15
Q

Child’s Abstract Stage

A
  • Around age 11 children can think in abstract terms
  • They can use abstract concepts such as co-ordinates, longitude, latitude, grid systems, and direction to orient themselves
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16
Q

What is a home range?

A

The distance one is allowed to range from home - as a rule, boys have larger home ranges than girls

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17
Q

What are spatial-cognitive biases?

A
  • Cognitive maps do not match cartographic maps
  • 3 ways we make mistakes:
  1. Euclidean
  2. Superordinate-scale
  3. Segmentation bias
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18
Q

What is a Euclidian bias?

A
  • We think of the world as more Euclidian or grid-like than it is
  • Many draw converging streets as parallel
  • Intersections that do not form right angles as forming right angles
  • Making cities grid-like makes it easier to navigate and think about space
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19
Q

What is superordinate-scale bias?

A
  • We use lines of reasoning to figure out locations
  • Which is further north? Toronto or Minneapolis? We think of Toronto in reference to Canada. We think of Minneapolis in reference to the US. Knowing that Canada is north of the US, we make the assumption that Toronto must be north of Minneapolis
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20
Q

What is the segmentation bias?

A
  • Our judgment of distance.
  • Mentally breaking a route into separate segments seems to alter our distance estimates.
  • Estimates over the whole route, or from segment to segment, increase with objective distance, but distance estimates within segments do not increase with objective distance
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21
Q

What are salient map features?

A
  • Highly salient features (prominent, conscpiuous) features of a cityscape would enhance one’s processing of information about it.
  • However, salience without organization significantly harmed spatial cognition
22
Q

What helps accurate map reading?

A

It depends upon how well the map is organized and how salient, visible, or obvious features of the place are rendered on the map

23
Q

Which features of building interiors influence spatial recognition or wayfinding in them?

A
  1. Signs and numbering systems
  2. Visibility of the destination and views to outdoors
  3. Differentiation (the distinctiveness of different parts of the building)
  4. Configuration (the overall layout of the building)
24
Q

Space syntax

A

A method of analyzing buildings and other places in terms of how the space’s physical features affect movement through space.
- Devised as an objective way of describing buildings and places, but research shows that sketch maps, which represent the subjective or cognitive views of a place, strongly mirror space syntax analyses of places.

25
Q

What is a good maze?

A

A good maze violates all four principles of optimal wayfinding:

  1. No signs or numbers
  2. No visibility
  3. No distinctive parts
  4. Very high complexity
26
Q

3 common cognitive biases about envisioning places

A
  1. Envisioning places are more grid-like than they are
  2. Wrongly employ larger geographical entities in placing in placing smaller ones
  3. Affected by the number of segments or barriers along a path
27
Q

What is legibility?

A

The more legible places are, the easier they are to comprehend and use. To create more legible cities, the theory suggests that urban planners should gradually shape their communities in five ways as the city grows and redevelops

28
Q

What are the 5 ways to increase a community’s legibility?

A
  1. Place landmarks at major decision points in the road system
  2. Keep these landmarks distinctive by maximizing their visibility; this can be accomplished by making them tall, separate from neighbouring buildings, unique in architectural style, and into enclosures for activities that result in much public use of the building
  3. Primary roads should coincide with the functional boundaries of districts to reinforce edges
  4. Preserve buildings that might serve as good landmarks when a district undergoes extensive redevelopment
  5. Construct landmarks in overly homogeneous districts
29
Q

Transit maps

A

Do not represent the subway accurately (in terms of the distance between stops), but make the map match the idea in riders’ heads … that the stops are equidistance - think of transit maps of Toronto

30
Q

What is a transactional-constructivist?

A

Spatial cognition cannot be understood until the transactions that occur between individuals and their settings are understood
We actively construct the world from data we have gleaned about it (as opposed to those who believe the world reveals itself to us as-it-is

31
Q

Regionalization

A

We tend to create groups of locations (e.g., rooms with a large building, buildings within a large city, towns within a geographic region).

32
Q

Hierarchical organization

A

We create categories within categories, such as cities within countries

33
Q

Anchor points

A
  • As there is not a precise definition for “landmark” it may be more accurate to say that regions tend to have cognitive anchor points.
  • In everyday spatial behaviour, these regionalized and hierarchical mental maps are used whenever we need to plan how to get from A to B
34
Q

Road climbing

A

The tendency to select long, straight routes from our starting point, even when that route is 50 longer

35
Q

Plans and goals

A

The indirect use of spatial knowledge, such as when we plan a series of errands, or other spatial tasks to be done in a certain order.

36
Q

What is an information-processing model of travel and orientation?

A

3 stages:

Stage 1 - Develop action plan - decision to travel
Stage 2 - Form travel plan - obtain information from media (maps, guides, signs) - obtain information from cognitive map (place memory)
Stage 3 - Execute travel plan - observe environment en route and at destination - maintain and restore orientation

37
Q

Hippocampus

A
  1. Some neurons in the hippocampus are specifically coded for place
  2. Networks of such neurons form a framework that represents, in a three-dimensional Euclidean framework, the settings known to the individual
  3. In humans, the portion of the hippocampus in the left hemisphere houses a semantic or word-based map and the portion in the right hemisphere houses a spatial or pictorial map
38
Q

Taxon system

A

Guides the routes one takes, using guidance hypotheses and orientation hypothese.

39
Q

Guidance hypotheses

A

Specifies objects or cues in the setting that should be approached or kept at a certain distance

40
Q

Orientation hypotheses

A

Specifies how certain things are to be accomplished behaviourally, such as “turn right, 90 degrees”

41
Q

Locale system

A

Refers to places

42
Q

Place hypotheses

A

Constructions by the brain that organize space knowledge important to the individual, such as “this is a dangerous place” or “this place has water”

43
Q

Place learning

A

Learning the names of places - appears to promote the learning of other types of spatial information, such as sequence or arrangement of landmarks better than orientation learning (learning where to turn left and right)

44
Q

1 - Categories of spatial cognition

A

Spatial Cognition Type = Spatial perception
Sample Function = Object localization
Brain Region = Occipital and parietal lobes

45
Q

2 - Categories of spatial cognition

A

Spatial Cognition Type = Spatial memory
Sample Function = Short-term memory for space
Brain Region = Hippocampus, thalamus

46
Q

3 - Categories of spatial cognition

A

Spatial Cognition Type = Spatial attention
Sample Function = Attention to space
Brain Region = Parietal lobe

47
Q

4 - Categories of spatial cognition

A

Spatial Cognition Type = Spatial operations
Sample Function = Mental rotation
Brain Region = Right parietal lobe

48
Q

5 - Categories of spatial cognition

A

Spatial Cognition Type = Spatial construction
Sample Function = Assembling parts into a whole
Brain Region = Parietal lobe

49
Q

Is spatial knowledge in humans stored as propositions or analogies?

A
  • The propositional approach hypothesizes that our knowledge of everyday space is stored in the brain as words
  • The analogical approach hypothesizes that the knowledge is stored as pictorial images
  • The propositional approach assumes that information is stored in abstract networks of meaning or schemata
    The analogical approach assumes it is stored as a model or image of the real world
50
Q

World Graph - Brain based theory of spatial cognition

A
  • Representation of relations among situations encountered by the individual
  • Each situation is said to be encoded in a neural node, but each place may be encoded in several neural nodes
51
Q

You-Are-Here Maps

A

To make You-Are-Here maps effective:

Structure matching

  • The map must reflect the layout and appearance of the setting it represents
  • The map is placed asymmetrically along the path in which it is placed, so that its views can easily see the relative location of the map within the setting
  • The you-are-here symbol on the map points to a little picture of the map itself
52
Q

Orientation for a You-Are-Here map

A
  • The map is aligned the same as the setting … east is east, west is west
  • The map has forward-up equivalence (the top of the map resresents straight ahead in the actual setting)
53
Q

Improving wayfinding with colour coding

A

Can be helpful with Alzheimer’s disease

Environmental Psychology (12 decks)

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