psychology

• Freud proposed that personality develops through psychosexual stages in childhood.
• Basic concepts of perception:
• Perception is the process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions to give meaning to their environment
• Perception involves receiving information about and making sense of the world around people
• It includes deciding which information to notice, how to categorize the information, and how to interpret it within one's existing knowledge
• Visual pathway and how the brain processes visual information:
• Light waves enter the eye through the cornea, pass through the pupil, and then enter the lens
• The lens bends the light rays to focus them on the retina, where electromagnetic energy of light is converted into messages for the brain
• Photoreceptors in the retina, rods for dimly lit situations and cones for color and details, convert light into signals sent to the brain
• Approaches to perception:
• Bottom-up processing starts with stimulation of receptors and works upward to form an internal representation of the object
• Top-down processing uses existing knowledge of the environment to guide the processing of sensory information
• Theoretical approaches to perception applied in real-life situations:
• Perceptual constancies allow the brain to see the size and shape of objects despite changes in distance, orientation, or lighting
• Size constancy enables seeing an object as the same size regardless of its location
• Shape constancy allows seeing an object as the same shape even when moved to a different location
• Deficits in perception:
• Without perceptual constancy, individuals would struggle to interpret sensory information and make sense of their surroundings
• Perceptual constancy is crucial for accurately perceiving the world and interacting predictably with the environment
• Types of refractive errors:

  • Myopia (nearsightedness): objects near are clear, but objects farther away are blurry
  • Hyperopia (farsightedness): can see distant objects clearly, but nearby objects may be blurry
• Psychological Stage organizes sensory information into a meaningful whole
• Perception of shapes is regulated by Gestalt Principles:

  • Proximity: objects close to each other are seen as forming a group
  • Similarity: objects are grouped based on their similarity
  • Continuity: tendency to perceive continuous forms
  • Closure: tendency to complete incomplete objects
  • Symmetry: objects perceived as forming mirror images about their center
• Approaches to Perception:

  • Bottom-up Processes:
  • Gibson’s Theory of Direct Perception: sensory information is all that is needed to perceive anything
  • Template-Matching Theory: matching stimuli with templates in memory
  • Prototype Theory: categorizing percepts by referencing prototypes
  • Feature Analysis Theory: breaking down stimuli into components for recognition
  • Recognition-by-Components Theory (RBC Theory): recognizing objects by basic geometric components called geons
  • Top-down Processes:
• • Constructive Perception: perceiver constructs a cognitive understanding of a stimulus
  • Context Effects: context influences perception
• Perception of Objects and Forms:

  • Viewer-Centered Representation: individual stores how the object looks to them
  • Object-Centered Representation: individual stores a representation of the object independent of its appearance to the viewer
• Facial Recognition:

  • Occurs in the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe
  • Cognitive processing of faces and emotions interact
  • "Face Positivity" Effect: preference for looking at happy faces
  • Prosopagnosia: inability to recognize faces due to damage to the configurational system
• Anomalies in Color Perception:

  • Trichromat: can see three dimensions (light-dark, yellow-blue, red-green)
  • Dichromat (partially color blind): defective in one of the two dimensions, often red-green
  • Protanopia: extreme form of red-green color blindness
  • Protanomaly: less extreme form of red-green color blindness
  • Monochromat (totally color blind): both color dimensions defective, only light-dark intact
• Attention is the ability to select a stimulus, focus on it, sustain that focus, and shift that focus at will - narrowing one’s focus to something specific
• Selective attention is mostly associated with focusing on specific objects and events
• Covert attention involves the shifting of attention, including the reorienting of sensory receptors
• Overt attention is the act of physically directing the eyes to a stimulus and the ability to shift attention from stimulus to stimulus without reorienting sensory receptors
• Unresponsive wakefulness, also known as a persistent vegetative state, is a condition where vital functions are preserved, but there is no awareness of the environment
• Endogenous attention is self-directed and voluntary attention to a stimulus, while exogenous attention is drawn toward a stimulus reflexively and involuntarily
• Spatial attention involves directing attention to the special location of stimuli, object attention focuses on a specific object in that location, and feature attention focuses on a specific feature of the stimuli
• Signal Detection Theory (SDT) explains how people pick out important stimuli in the presence of distracting stimuli
• Vigilance involves watchfully waiting to detect a signal stimulus that may appear at an unknown time
• Search involves actively seeking out a target in the environment and is made more difficult by distracters
• Selective attention allows individuals to pick specific information to focus on out of several stimuli
• Broadbent's Model and Attenuation Model are models of selective attention that explain how sensory information is processed
• The Later-Filter Model selects which information makes it to conscious awareness or memory