3. Perception Flashcards
The perception chapter
Perception is the process by which we recognize what is represented by the information provided by our sense organs. Is a rapid, automatic, unconscious process.
Perception of for. Most of what we see can be classified as objects or background. Objects are things having particular shapes and particular location in space. Background is formless and help us to judge the location of objects we see in front of it.
In psychology the terms figure and ground are used to label an object and it’s background, respectively. The classification of an item as a figure or as a part of the background is not an intrinsic property of of the item. rather it depends on the observer’s behavior.
Perception of form: the principles of Gestalt
The school of Gestalt psychology believes that the task of perception is to recognize objects in the environment according to the organisation of their elements. In perception the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Elements of a visual scene can combine in various ways to produce different forms.
Several principles of grouping can predict that combination of these elements:
The adjacency/proximity principle
The similarity principle
Good continuation
The law of closure
The principle of common fate
Perception of form: bottom-up and top-down processing.
Bottom-up processing: the perception is constructed out of the elements - the bits and pieces - of the stimulus, beginning with the image that falls on the retina. the information is processed by successive levels of the visual system until the highest levels are reached and the object is perceived.
Top down processing: refers to the use of contextual information, to the use of the big picture.
Direct perception: Gibson’s Affordances
Gibson’s theory of perception: perceiving is an act, not a response, an act of attention, not a triggered impression, an achievement, not a reflex.
Gibson abandoned the depth/space perception view of the world and instead suggested that our perception of surfaces was more important.
Gibson’s affordances: the meaning that the environment, give us in respect of what an object furnishes us with, what it afford us.
Face perception
Being able to recognize and identify faces is one of the most important social functions human beings can perform.
It helps us form relationships with people, spot faces in the crowd, and provides us with potential non-verbal cues as to what a person is thinking or feeling.
Psychologist in the 19th century were interested in what makes a face attractive and constructed composites -averages of several different images- to produce a face which they believed was attractive.
Recent work has indicated wich features of the face best allow us to remember a face or which make a face distinctive.
Face perception: distinctiveness and attractiveness
Distinctiveness of the face, defined as the deviation from the norm, is unrelated to attractiveness.
Galton’s hypothesis is that averageness was attractiveness.
Theories of Face perception
The mechanisms that allow us to perceive faces are considered to be different from those that allow us to perceive objects. Face perception involves a number of operations. Bruce and young have suggested that face processing is made up of three functions:
perception of facial expression perception of familiar faces perception of unfamiliar faces
Perception of space and motion
In addition to being able to perceive the forms of objects in our environment, we are able to judge quite accurately their relative location in space and their movements.
Perceiving where things are and perceiving what they are doing are obviously important fuctions of the visual system.
Depth perception requires that we perceive the distance of objects in the environment from us and from each other.
We do so by means of two kids of cues:
Binocular (“two -eye”) cues: the visual fields of both eyes overlap.
Monocular (“one-eye”) cues: typical of animals that have eyes on the sides of their heads.
What is perception in psychology?
Perception is the process by which to recognise what is presented by the information provided by our sense organs. Is a rapid, automatic unconscious process.
In other words Perception can be defined as the sensory experience of the world, which includes how an individual recognizes and interpreter sensory information. This also includes how one responds to those stimuli.
The process of organising visual field into meaningful wholes is known as form perception.
The school of Gestalt psychology, gestaltliterally means form in German, introduce the idea that the whole is more from the sum of its parts. Perception is to recognize objects in the environment according to the organization of their elements. Elements of a visual scene can combine in various ways to produce different forms.
In other words, the brain creates a perception that is more than simply the sum of available sensory inputs, and it does so in predictable ways. Those ways can be described in Gestalt’s principles. The adjacent/proximity principle, the similarity principle, good continuation, the law of closure and the principle of fate.
In the perception of form we have a bottom-up and a top-down way of processing.
Bottom-up processing begins with the retrieval of sensory information from our external environment to build perceptions based on the current input of sensory information (Gibson, 1966).
Top-down processingis the interpretation of incoming information based on prior knowledge, experiences, and expectations to the use of the “big picture”
Bottom-up processing is the process of ‘sensation’ and top-down is the process of ‘perception’.
Gibson’s bottom up theory suggests that perception involves innate mechanisms forged by evolution and that no learning is required. He abandoned the depth space perception view of the world and suggested that our perception of the surface was more important.
Gibson’s affordances means what the environment offers the individual.
Face perception means to being able to recognize and identify faces. this is one of the most important social functions human beings can’t perform. it help us form relationships with people, spot faces in the crowd and provide us with potential nonverbal cues as to what the person is thinking or feeling.
The distinctiveness of a face defined as the deviation from the norm. Galton’s hypothesis is that averageness was attractiveness.
Perception of space and motion perceiving where things are and perceiving what they are doing are obviously important function of the visual system. Depth perception requires that we perceive the distance of objects in the environment from us and from each other.We do so by means of two kids of cues:
Binocular (“two -eye”) cues: the visual fields of both eyes overlap.
Monocular (“one-eye”) cues: typical of animals that have eyes on the sides of their heads.
The unchanging perception of an object size and shape when it moves relatively to us is called form constancy: it is achieved by unconscious inference a mental computation of which we are unaware. Lastly, the perception of motion, when we detect movement, is one of the most primitive aspects of visual perception. We can not only detect movement but also what it is moving and the direction in which it is moving.
