Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Perception
• Selective attention
– Refers to the process by which we attend to certain
stimuli and ignore others
– Eye movements – studies of visual attention monitor
people’s eye fixation patterns which attend to features
most likely to distinguish scene for other similar scenes
• Auditory attention
– Also use selective attention in audition, e.g. by focusing
on the direction the sound is coming from and features of
the speaker’s voice, e.g. pitch and intonation
Use with Atkinson & Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology 15th edition
Nolen-Hoeksema, Fredrickson, Loftus, Wagenaar
ISBN 9781844807284 © 2009 Cengage Learning
Attention
• ...Separation of objects
– Grouping of objects - according to several determinants
– proximity to each other, similarity, good continuation or
closure. These serve to create most stable and simple
forms possible within a given pattern
• Perceiving distance
– To know where object is, we use depth cues
• Binocular cues – brain uses information from eyes to infer depth
• Monocular cues – for distant objects we use environmental
information e.g. perspective, interposition, relative size & height,
shading & shadows and motion
• Perceiving motion
– To move around environment effectively need to
know direction of moving objects either using
stroboscopic motion (illusion of motion) or real motion
• Exact to abstract
– Only need to know enough visual detail to carry out
whatever task is requiring you to perceive the object
• The advantages of abstraction: required storage
and processing speed
– More efficient to perceive and encode an abstraction
of an object than exact representation in memory
– Because abstraction uses less space, faster to work
with
– Information retained is the critical information needed
Use with Atkinson & Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology 15th edition
Nolen-Hoeksema, Fredrickson, Loftus, Wagenaar
ISBN 9781844807284 © 2009 Cengage Learning
Perceptual Constancies
• Size constancy
– An object’s perceived size remains relatively constant
no matter how far away it is
– Dependence on depth cues – perceived size of an
object increases with both the retinal size of the
object and the perceived distance of the object
(known as the size-distance invariance principle)
• Constancies in all sensory modalities
– Although visual constancies most salient, constancies
exist in all sensory modalities
• ...Discrimination by infants
– Perceiving forms
• Visual acuity develops rapidly over the first six months, then
more slowly until reaches adult levels between 1-2 years
• Sensitivity to some shape features of objects appears very
early in life, e.g. three-day-old infant will direct eye
movements to edges when presented with triangle
– Perceiving depth
• Depth perception begins to appear at three months but not
fully established until about six months
• ...Discrimination by infants
– Perceiving constancies
• Also starts to develop in first few months of life, particularly
for shape and size constancy
• Controlled stimulation
– Absence of stimulation
• Animals raised in darkness suffered permanent visual
impairment suggesting that there is a critical period early in
life when lack of normal stimulation produces deficiency in
innate perceptual capacities
• ...Controlled stimulation
– Limited stimulation
• Animals receive stimuli in both eyes but only certain kinds –
leads to deficiency in stimuli they do not receive. Facts
indicate that certain kinds of stimulation essential for
development and maintenance of perceptual capacities
present at birth
– Active perception
• Learning plays major role for coordinating perceptions with
motor responses