Paper 1 - AQA Psychology

• Perception


  How we interpret or make sense of the sensory information that we receive
• Perception


  • Various explanations and theories for how perception actually works including how culture can affect perception
• Visual perception


  • Seeing the outline of a dalmatian walking in a collection of dots and blobs
• Bottom-up process


  Perception is based solely on the information received by our eyes
• Top-down process


  Our mind generates expectations of what we are looking at, and it is these expectations that then help us make sense of the information our eyes receive
• Gibson's direct theory of perception


  • The real world presents sufficient information for direct perception without inference
  • Role of motion parallax in everyday perception
• Sensation


  Information we receive through the senses
• Transduction


  The process of converting sensory information into electrical signals
• Our bodies are bombarded with lots of information, far more than we can actually cope with if we were to give it all attention
• Perception


  The process of interpreting and making sense of all the information we receive
• Monocular depth cues


  • Height in plane
  • Relative size
  • Occlusion
  • Linear perspective
• Binocular depth cues


  • Retinal disparity
  • Convergence
• Motion parallax


  The way in which our visual field changes with movement, with close objects seeming to move more than objects which are far away
• Gibson argued the real world was three-dimensional and where we stand and move about within it is as much a part of real-world perception as shape and colour
• Affordances


  The possibilities for actions which the environment offers
• Gibson's theory proposes that sensation and perception are the same processes
• Visual illusions demonstrate that perception involves making inferences about what we see when the image is ambiguous, undermining Gibson's theory
• Reasons for visual illusions

  • Ambiguity
  • Misinterpreted depth cues
  • Fiction
  • Size constancy
• Size constancy


  Keeping the original perception of the size of an object even when information received by the eyes changes
• Perceptual constancy


  Perceiving objects as being the same (constant) even when the visual image we receive is different
• Fiction


  Creating something that isn't really there in order to complete the image
• Perceptual system


  • Generates an image that fills the gap to create something plausible for us
• Shape constancy


  • Looking at a cup from different angles, the shapes we receive on the retina are very different but we still see the same shape
• Size constancy


  • People who are in the distance appear smaller, but as they approach we do not see them growing larger
• Gregory's constructivist theory of perception


  Perception uses inferences from visual cues and past experience to construct a model of reality
• Gregory proposed that perception worked by making reasonable guesses about what we are seeing based on what it is most likely to be</b>
• Gregory believed perception involved cognitive processes and that we do not simply perceive information that we receive
• Gregory believed we rely on stored knowledge and experiences which affects our perception
• Gilchrist and Nesberg (1952)


  • Found that hunger affected how people perceived images of food
• Not everyone agrees with the explanations given for illusions such as the Muller-Lyer illusion
• The Muller-Lyer illusion still works when the arrowheads are replaced with circles
• Perceptual set


  A state of readiness for the information we receive from the environment around us
• We need to be able to select what we are going to focus our attention on and what we are going to ignore
• All our cognitive processes such as memory, decision-making, learning and perception can all be affected by the perceptual set
• Memory


  • We remember different things dependent on our mood
• Decision-making

  • Affected by what we have just seen or what we are expecting
• Learning

  • Babies learn nursery rhymes more easily than normal sentences or letters
• When we expect something, we are more likely to notice it
• Bruner and Minturn's study on expectation provides research support for this
• Children in western societies are raised accustomed to line drawings and cartoons, while children from traditional tribal societies draw animals as if they were flat and spread across