Visual Perception

Question 1

What can influence perception?

Answer 1

Attention and stimulus characteristics

Question 2

What illusion demonstrates how attention influences perception in neurologically healthy people?

Answer 2

Shooting line illusion
Just showing a line on a page
Cue attention to one side of the line and then line appears, experience a ‘shooting line’
Looks like the line shoots away from the cue.

Question 3

What is an example of how stimulus characteristics can influence perceptions in neurologically healthy people?

Answer 3

Repetition blindness

Question 4

The modification of the repetition blindness test, this was the one with the blue and yellow letters, what did this show?

Answer 4

Just looking at the sustained-attention condition (so a blue ‘s’ always on the left, meaning to attend to the colour of the letter on the right), this means the participant is attending to colour on these trials and not switching to letters.
There was just as much repetition blindness when the letter was blue on the right, even when the letter changed (unattended dimension changed).
So it does matter what you’re paying attention to.