Chapter 2: Visual and auditory Recognition

Question 1

Perception

Answer 1

Uses previous knowledge to gather and interpret the stimuli registered by the senses

Question 2

Object/pattern recognition

Answer 2

Identifying a complex arrangement of sensory stimuli and perceiving that this pattern is separate from its background

Question 3

Distal stimulus

Answer 3

The actual object that is, ”out there” in the environment

Question 4

Proximal stimulus

Answer 4

The information registered on your sensory receptors

Question 5

What is another name for iconic memory?

Answer 5

Visual sensory memory

Question 6

Ambiguous figure-ground relationship

Answer 6

The figure and ground reverse from time to time

Question 7

What are two explanations for figure-ground reversal

Answer 7

1) the neurons in the visual cortex become adapted to one figure
2) people try to solve the visual paradox by alternating between the two reasonable solutions

Question 8

Illusory/subjective contours

Answer 8

We see edges even though they are not physically present in the stimulus

Question 9

Templates

Answer 9

Specific patterns that have been stored in memory

Question 10

Feature-analysis theory

Answer 10

There are several theories that propose a relatively flexible approach, in which a visual stimulus is composed of a small number of characteristics or components

Question 11

The recognition-by-components Theory

Answer 11

Theory of how humans recognize 3-D shapes; a specific view of an object can be represented as an arrangement of simple 3-D shapes called Geons

Question 12

Viewer-Centred approach

Answer 12

Proposes that we store a small number of views of three-dimensional objects, rather than just one view

Question 13

Bottom-up processing

Answer 13

Emphasizes that the stimulus characteristics are important when you recognize an object; physical stimuli are registered on the sensory receptors which are then passed on to higher levels of the perceptual system

Question 14

Top-down processing

Answer 14

Emphasizes how a persons concepts, expectations, and memory can influence object recognition

Question 15

Word superiority effect

Answer 15

We can identify a single letter more accurately and more rapidly when it appears in a meaningful word then when it appears alone by itself or else in a meaningless string of unrelated letters

Question 16

Change blindness

Answer 16

Failure to detect a change in an object or scene

Question 17

Inattentional blindness

Answer 17

When we are paying attention to some events in a scene, we may fail to notice when an unexpected but completely visible object suddenly appears

Question 18

We recognize faces on a ______ basic

Answer 18

Holistic, or gestalt

Question 19

Prosopagnosia

Answer 19

A disability in which people cannot recognize human faces visually though they perceive other objects relatively normally

Question 20

Face-inversion effect

Answer 20

People are much more accurate in identifying upright faces, compared to upside down faces

Question 21

Speech perception

Answer 21

Your auditory system must record the sound vibrations generated by someone talking; then the system must translate these vibrations into a sequence of sounds that you perceive to be speech

Question 22

Phoneme

Answer 22

The basic unit of spoken language

Question 23

Coarticulation

Answer 23

When you are pronouncing a particular phoneme, your mouth remains in somewhat the same shape it was when you pronounced the previous phoneme; in addition, your mouth is preparing to pronounce the next phoneme

Question 24

Phonemic restoration

Answer 24

People can fill in a missing phoneme using contextual meaning as a Cue

Question 25

McGurk effect

Answer 25

Refers to the influence of visual information on speech perception, when individuals must integrate both visual and auditory information

Question 26

Special mechanism approach

Answer 26

Believes that humans are born with a specialized device that allows us to decode speech stimuli

Question 27

Phonetic module

Answer 27

A special-purpose neural mechanism that specifically processes all aspects of speech perception

Question 28

Categorical perception

Answer 28

Hearing a clear-cut sound rather than a sound partway between the two sounds

Question 29

The general mechanism approaches

Answer 29

Argues that we can explain speech perception without proposing any special phonetic module

Question 30

What are the 4 important characteristics of speech perception?

Answer 30

1. Listeners can impose boundaries between words, even when these words are not separated by silence
2. Phoneme pronunciation varies tremendously
3. Context allows listeners to fill in some missing words
4. Visual cues from the speaker’s mouth help us interpret ambiguous sounds