psychological factors visual perception

• Visual Perception

  The process of understanding and interpreting visual information
• Psychological Factors

  Internal factors pertaining to an individual's mental processes, including their cognition, affect, thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes
• Visual Perception Principles

  Guiding rules that apply to incoming visual signals and determine how they are organised and interpreted
• Gestalt Principles

  The guiding rules of perception that allow us to organise and group separate stimuli into a meaningful whole
• Visual Perception Principles

  • Help us to make sense of our reality as they combine visual signals in a systematic way
  • Automatic and unconscious
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  Types of Visual Perception Principles

  • Gestalt Principles
  • Visual Constancies
  • perceptual set
• The Proximity Principle

  Our brain's tendency to group together items in an image based on their physical closeness to one another
• The Similarity Principle

  Our brains' tendency to group together parts of an image that are similar in some way (e.g. size, shape, colour, position)
• The Figure-Ground Principle

  Our brains' tendency to see some figures as being at the front of an image, with some elements existing in the 'foreground'/'figure' and others in the 'background'/'ground'
• The Figure-Ground Principle

  • The image could be interpreted as either two faces or a vase
• The Closure Principle

  Our brain's ability to mentally complete images that are otherwise incomplete
• Visual Constancies

  Our ability to perceive visual objects as staying the same, even though they may appear to, or actually, change in our sensation
• Perceptual Set

  A predisposition to perceive certain features of sensory stimuli and ignore other features that are deemed irrelevant
• Perceptual Set

  • Affects perception during selection (feature detectors may select or ignore certain visual stimuli) and interpretation (we may interpret what we see in a certain way, especially when it is ambiguous)
  • Is influenced by historical experiences (lived events from our past that inform or influence our perceptual set)
• If we're hungry and see a green object in our peripheral vision, we may have a greater readiness to interpret it as an apple
• Explain how two different Gestalt principles allow a person to make out the image on this road sign.

  
  

  The Gestalt principle of closure allows us to perceive the zebra crossing on the road sign as we mentally complete the incomplete image. We do this by seeing the yellow gaps between the black stripes as completing and being a part of the zebra crossing. The figure-ground principle is also used, in that we can see most of the yellow of the signing as forming the more distant background, and the black figures of the crossing and children as being in the closer foreground.
• A negative influence of Maxine’s perceptual set on her VP is that her historical experience prevents her from noticing other foods that are out of date. She became predisposed to perceive spilled items, and ignore non-spilled items that are past their use-by date. Maxine’s perceptual set has a positive influence in that it allows her to locate lots of spilled items that she may have generally missed, due to an increased vigilance based on her historical experience with spotting them at the start of the clean-out.
• What are visual constancies, and how were they involved in Kody and Yuko’s perceptions of the size of the paintings from different perspectives?

  Visual constancies are an ability to perceive visual objects as staying the same, even though they may appear to change or do change in our sensation. The visual constancy for size would have allowed Kody and Yuko to perceive the size of the paintings as the same, despite the sensation of the paintings changing.
• Explain how the selection stage of Rohan’s visual perception might interact with his perceptual set.

  During selection, Rohan’s feature detectors may cause certain visual features or stimuli to be attended to or ignored, depending on his predisposition. If Rohan is predisposed to perceive certain features of visual stimuli, during selection he will typically filter and choose these stimuli. His perceptual set is influenced by the historical experience of falling off of his bike, so during selection, he might preferentially select visual stimuli that signal a slippery part of a bike path.