معرفيه 7

• Sensation

  Sensory organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin) detect stimuli from the world
• Perception

  The process of interpreting sensory information (touch, vision, hearing, smell, and taste) in order to comprehend (understand) the environment
• Sensation and perception work seamlessly together to allow us to detect both the presence of, and changes in, the stimuli around us
• The study of sensation and perception is exceedingly important for our everyday lives because the knowledge generated by psychologists is used in so many ways to help so many people
• Transduction

  The process where a sensory receptor converts a type of stimulus energy (e.g., photon, sound wave) into an electrical impulse that can be interpreted by the brain
• Each sense accomplishes the basic process of transduction in different, but related, ways
• Perception significantly affects our behavior, emotions, and cognitive processes
• Perception helps us to stay safe, e.g. differentiate the smell of a rose from a chicken that would be burning in your oven
• Perception helps us recognize people around us, the face of someone you know would just be a combination of colors and shapes
• Top-down processing


  Processing sensory information using prior knowledge, memories, experiences, or expectations to interpret and understand the information
• Bottom-up processing

  Processing sensory information from the raw environment in the brain, considered 'data driven' as it starts with the stimulus
• Top-down processing

  • Understanding accents, assuming someone talking about beaches used the word "sand"
  • Phantom limb sensation, the brain filling in the expected sensation based on past experiences
• Bottom-up processing

  • Listening to a new language
  • Detecting a smell from cooking food
• Bottom-up processing is less likely to produce errors based on assumptions or predictions, as it is based strictly on sensory input, but it is extremely time-consuming and often unrealistic
• Top-down processing helps us to develop quick understandings of concepts based on past experiences, but can also lead to errors if predictions or assumptions are incorrect
• Our perception is influenced by our ability to attend to certain stimuli while filtering out others selectively
• Selective attention

  • When reading a book, selectively attending to the words on the page while ignoring other sensory information
  • Hearing your name at a party
• Different cultures have unique values, norms, and beliefs that shape their world perception
• Cultural influences on perception

  • Funeral customs
  • Thoub and abaya
• Our past experiences shape our perception of the world around us, and these experiences may lead us to interpret certain stimuli differently from others
• Past experiences influencing perception

  • A good experience with cats often results in seeing them as friendly
  • A negative encounter with cats may make them appear intimidating
• Perceptual processes

  Selection, organization, interpretation, sensation
• Selection

  Choosing which of many stimuli will be processed
• Organization

  Simplifying and reducing our world to help make sense of it, e.g. perceptual grouping and figure-ground
• Interpretation

  The brain assigns meaning to the organized information, creating our perception of the world
• Gibson's theory of direct perception


  Perception can be explained entirely based on the environment, starting with a sensory stimulus that travels from the eye's retina to the visual cortex

  
• Gibson's theory rightfully points out that we can gain a lot of information and make accurate judgements based on sensory data, especially in natural environments
• Depth perception

  Our ability to see objects in three dimensions, including their size and how far away they are from us
• Depth perception makes it possible for your eyes to determine distances between objects and to tell if something is near to you or far away
• In order to have depth perception, you must have binocular vision
• Monocular cues

  Visual cues that allow for some sense of depth perception even when you don't have two eyes working properly together (using one eye to see)
• Binocular vision


  The most important aspect of binocular vision is having two eyes, which provides more accurate depth perception
• Relative size

  Monocular cue where objects that are farther away look smaller to the eye, while objects that are closer up look larger
• Interposition


  A monocular cue where one object partially obscures or covers another object, giving the perception the object that is partially covered is farther away
• Motion parallax


  The way that the visual world changes when a person or animal moves, where closer objects appear to move more and more distant ones move less, telling us about the distance of objects
• Perception also occurs relatively fast; we can respond to the environment almost instantaneously, which the direct theory of perception better explains
• Binocular disparity


  The difference in image location of an object seen by the left and right eyes, resulting from the eyes' horizontal separation (parallax)
• When both eyes focus on an object, the different position of the eyes produces a disparity of visual angle, and a slightly different image is received by each retina
• Binocular convergence

  When both eyes rotate inward at different angles to focus on an object
• The aim of the study was investigating the ability of newborn animals and human infants to detect depth