2.1

• Bottom Up processing: Relies on external sensory information

  • Meaning is made from what is sensed
  • Stimuli travels to brain leading to interpretation
  • Visual information from other cars is processed
• Top Down processing:

  • Relies on internal prior expectations
  • Background knowledge is used to interpret what we see
  • Braking when approaching a red light
• Internal Influences:

  • Motivation based on a need
  • Emotions may alter our perception based on our mood
  • Expectations can cause the information provided to be received negatively
  • Learning can be based on prior knowledge
  • Cultural norms can influence what is considered acceptable/unacceptable regarding perception
• External Influences:

  • Media influences our opinions based on who agrees/disagrees
  • Intensity of words (color/brightness) can draw your attention and decrease your ability to perceive smaller details
  • Crowds can lead to overstimulation
  • Clothing/outer appearances influence your first impressions of people
• Gestalt psychology: Emphasizes that the whole of anything is greater than its parts

  • Helps explain how humans organize their perceptual world
• Figure & Ground: the organization of the visual field into figures that stand out from their background
• Proximity: objects close together will be viewed together visually
• Similarity: items that share attributes will be visually grouped together
• cocktail party effect: the brain focuses on a particular stimulus, that is usually distant
• inattentional blindness: failing to see objects when our attention is elsewhere
• change blindness: occurs when changes to our environment are not perceived due to inattention
• signal detection theory: predicts how and when a faint stimulus amid background noise is detected
• Binocular cues:

  • Stereopsis: 3D image resulting from binocular vision
  • retinal disparity: perceiving depth; by comparing images from the retinas in each eye, the brian computes distance (the > the disparity, the closer the object)
  • convergence: merging of retinal images by the brain (eyes move inward to view close images/move outward to view farther image)
• Monocular cues:

  • linear perspective: parallel lines appear to converge in the distance
  • relative size: if 2 objects are similar in size, we perceive the ones that cast a smaller image as farther away
  • relative clarity: hazy objects appear to be farther away than those that appear sharp/clear
  • interposition: objects that block other items are perceived as closer
  • texture gradient: fine texture signals increasing distance
• stroboscopic movement: a series of still images in rapid succession appears to be moving continuously

  • film, stop-motion flipbooks
• autokinetic effect: visual illusion occurs when a stationary object, like a pinpoint of light, appears to movie in a dark environment
• color constancy: our perception of color remains the same even when the lighting changes
• shape constancy: when our viewing angle changes/an object rotates, we still perceive the object as staying the same shape
• lightness/brightness constancy: our perception of the whiteness/blackness/grayness of objects stays the same no matter the change in light
• Bottom-up processing:

  • Relies on external sensory info
  • Meaning is made from what is sensed
  • Stimuli travel to the brain --> interpretation
• Perceptual set: the tendency to perceive or notice some aspects of the available sensory data and ignore others.

  Two ways a perceptual set may work:

  • Selector: the perceiver has certain expectations and focuses attention on particular aspects of the sensory data
  • Interpreter: the perceiver knows how to classify, understand, and name selected data and what inferences to draw from it
• Schemas: mental filters or maps that organize our information about the world; can impact our perceptual sets
• Context effects: the environmental factors that surround an event affect how an event is perceived and remembered.
• Selective attention: the focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus
• closure: the brain filling in gaps to create a whole
• perceptual constancy: our ability and need to perceive objects as unchanging even as changes may occur in the distance, point of view, and illumination (color, size, and light constancy).