Week 1 : Introduction Flashcards
1
Q
Why is this psychology?
A
- the goal is to understand perceptual experience, how our brains make sense of the sensory world around us
- understanding how our minds, through our brains, interpret the world around us in an inherently psychological goal
- lastly, psychological processes (like attention, intention, emotion & biases) influence the ways in which we perceive the world
2
Q
Why study perception at all?
A
- Creating an analog perception of the world through a digital signal
- human perception greatly improves all processes in the social world
3
Q
Bottom-up & top-down flow of information
A
Perception represents a combination of bottom-up processes (shape, colour, motion) with top-down information that arises from cognitive processing of a stimuli (predictions, theory, knowledge, context)
4
Q
The senses…
A
- vision
- hearing
- smell (olfaction)
- taste (gustation)
- light touch
- pressure
- cold
- heat
- pain
- itch
- vestibular
- proprioception
5
Q
Sensation…
A
- refers to the registering of a physical stimulus on our sensory receptors
- sensation changes physical stimuli into information in our nervous system
- about stimuli
6
Q
Perception…
A
- refers to the later aspects of the perceptual process which involves turning the sensory input into meaningful conscious experience
- the translation of the neural signal into useable info
- perception occurs after cognitive processing begins, typically in the cerebral cortex
- about interpretation
7
Q
transduction & neural responses
A
- for each of our sensory systems, we have specialized neural cells called receptors that transduce (transform) a physical stimulus into an electrochemical signal… called a neural response & sent to the brain
- this is how stimuli the outside world becomes perceptual experiences
- sensation = transduction & perception = guide functional action
8
Q
Phenomenology…
A
- our subjective experience of perception
- refers to our internal experience of the world around us
- unique creation of the living brain
9
Q
history of sensation & perception
A
- Writings on disorders of sensation and perception go back all the way to the ancient Egyptian
- Aristotle theorized extensively about perception and its causes (motion aftereffect/waterfall illusion & touch between tips of fingers)
- Later in the 19th century, German physiologists began experimenting on the neural processes that underlie sensation, and others started the field of psychophysics
- Later influences in the development of sensation and perception research include gestalt psychology, Gibsonian direct perception, information processing and the computational approach.
- Neuroscience also addresses issues of sensation and perception.
- Neuroscience research includes single-cell recording, neuropsychology and neuroimaging.
10
Q
Helmholtz…
A
- the first person to determine the speed of the neural impulse (or action potential)
- developed the concept of the trichromatic theory of colour vision
- developed a general theory of how our senses work & argued that the info from the sensory signal itself is inadequate to explain perception, so the signal needs to be interpreted by active cognitive process… so we must incorporate info from existing knowledge to completely perceive the world
- called unconscious inference
- work influences information processing and computational approach
11
Q
Hering…
A
- opponent-process theory
- thought that environmental inputs and our sensory systems are sufficient for us to grasp the structure of the perceived world
- influences gestalt psychology & direct perception theory
12
Q
Weber…
A
- Weber’s law states that a just-noticeable difference (JND) between two stimuli is related to the magnitude/strength of a stimuli
- concerned w the perception of difference between 2 stimuli
- it is harder to distinguish between 2 samples when they are larger/stronger levels of stimuli
13
Q
Fechner…
A
- founder of psychophysics = the study of the relation between physical stimuli and perception
- fechner colour effect = moving black-and-white figures create an illusion of colour
- fechner’s law = states that sensation is a logarithmic function of physical intensity… our perception of the intensity of a stimulus increases at a lower rate than does the actual intensity of the stimulus
14
Q
psychophysical approach
A
- seeks to understand how the physical properties of a stimulus affect its perception
- This is often done by measuring by how much a particular stimulus property must be changed in order for that change to be noticeable (Weber)
- absolute threshold, JND
15
Q
direct perception (Gibsonian approach)
A
- the world generates so much information that the senses only need to pick it up directly
- emphasizes ecological realism in experiments