FINAL Flashcards
(41 cards)
Ecological Approach to Perception
Focus on studying perception in situations where you interact with and move through the environment
Optic flow:
appearance of objects as the observer moves past them
Optic flow is more rapid near the moving observer
The different speed of flow—fast near the
observer and slower farther away—is called
the gradient of flow
The absence of flow at the destination
point is called
the focus of expansion (FOE)
invariant information—
information that remains constant regardless of what the observer is doing or how the
observer is moving
affordances—
information that indicates how an object can be used
More than just recognizing the object
Guide our interactions with it
Another way of saying this is that “potential for action” is part of our perception of an object
action affordance because
it involves both the object’s affordance
(what it is for, for example, “pounding” for a hammer) and the
action associated with it (the grip necessary to hold the hammer
and the movements when pounding in a nail)
visual direction strategy
people keep their body pointed toward their
goal.
spatial updating
process by which people and animals keep track of their position within a surrounding environment while they move
Optic flow provides important information about
direction and speed when walking and this
information can be combined with the visual direction strategy and spatial updating processes to guide walking behaviors
landmarks—
objects on the route that serve as cues to indicate where to turn
decision-point landmarks—
objects at corners where the participant had to decide which direction to turn
non-decision-point landmarks—
objects located in the middle of corridors that provided no critical information
about how to navigate.
parahippocampal
gyrus may automatically be “highlighting” landmarks that
indicate when you should continue going straight, turn right, or turn left, even when you may not remember having seen these
landmarks before
place cells
only fire when an animal is in a
certain place in the environment
area of the environment within which a place cell fires is called
place field
grid cell
provide information about the direction of movement
able to code distance and direction
information as an animal moves, and place cells and grid cells probably work together, because they are connected
with each other.
visuomotor grip cells
involved in both perception (identifying the object and/or its affordances by seeing) and action (reaching for the object and gripping it with the hand)
proprioception—
the ability to sense body position and movement.
mirror neurons—
neurons that respond both when a monkey observes someone else grasping an object such as food on a tray and when the monkey itself grasps the food
audiovisual mirror neurons
respond when a monkey performs a hand action and when it hears the sound associated with this action
The action-specific perception hypothesis states that
people perceive their environment in terms
of their ability to act on it.
cue approach to depth perception
focuses on identifying information in the retinal image that is correlated
with depth in the scene
occlusion
cue that one object is in front of another
