Unit 2- Cognition (Gabriel) Flashcards
Unit 2 (32 cards)
Selective Attention
The ability to intentionally focus awareness on specific aspects of a situation or information and block other stimuli. Example: When performing a trick magicians make you focus on their right hand to block out attention to subtle movements of the left hand.
Perceptual Set
A predisposition to perceive or notice some aspects of the available sensory data and ignore others. Aka a cognitive bias based on prior experiences and expectations. Ex: A person may perceive a dog jumping up and down as a threat while an other perxon sees it as cute.
Binocular Cues
Binocular cues are visual information taken in by two eyes that enable us a sense of depth perception, or stereopsis.
Stereopsis: the visual ability to perceive the world in three dimensions
Retinal Disparity
Retinal disparity is one of the cues that humans use in order to perceive depth. Specifically, it involves the use of both eyes and refers to the difference between the view that each eye receives of a given object or scene. Ex: Closing one’s left eye will resulting in looking at the world through the right eye view whcih differs from the left.
An example of binocular cues
Binocular Convergence
Binocular convergence is the phenomenon where your eyes rotate inwards to focus on an object, and the degree to which they rotate indicates to your brain how near or far an object is - nearer objects require a greater degree of inward rotation than objects farther from your face.
Monocular Cues
Monocular depth cues are depth cues that are able to be perceived without both eyes.
Monocular Cue
Relative Height
Things at a distance look like their base is higher. Ex: If one stares at two trees that are far, the fartherst tree will seem like their base is higher than the shorter tree.
Search up image to clarify
Monocular Cue
Relative Size
A monocular cue that helps. us understand that closer objects usually seem larger than farther objects. Ex: When staring at two trees in the horizon the closer tree wil appear bigger than the farther tree.
Monocular Cue
Texture Gradient
Objects with more defined and coarser texture appear to be closer than objects with finer, smoother textures. Ex: While staring at two trees in the distance, the one that is closer has definition within its tree bark and one can clearly see the coarse texture, while a tree far away appears to be smoother.
Monocular Cue
Interposition
Type of monocular cue in which one object partially covers another object, giving the perception that the partially covered object is farther away. When seeing two trees in the horizonone tree partially covers the other from your point of view which indicates the partially covered tree is farther away.
Monocular Cues
Linear perspective
Monocular depth cue in that causes parallel lines to appear to meet at some point in the distance. The vanishing point is where the lines seem to merge. Linear perspective not only affects our judgment of depth, but also how we perceive size.
Ex: When staring at a long road infront of you it appears that as it approaches the horizon the two sides of the road connect.
Monocular Cues
Relative Clarity
Method of determining depth by noticing that distant objects appear less clear than nearby objects.
Phi Phenomenon
The phi phenomenon is an optical illusion of seeing still images as moving. This is shown by viewing flip book images that seem to be moving as you turn the pages quickly. Another example of this is when watching movies. The frames are rapidly displayed in such succession that it looks like one whole moving image.
Search up images
Gestalt Psychology
Explores how we see the world as organized wholes rather than individual parts.
Gestalt
Figure-ground
Allows a person to direct their focus to a fiure rather than it’s background. Allows to distinguish between an object and background. Ex: When seeing an image of a kid with a white background, you focus on the kid instead of on the white background.
Gestalt
Closure
The tendency to perceive incomple shapes or figures as complete objects. The brain typically fills in the gaps in information to form a recognizable whole.
Look images up
Gestalt
Similarity
Perceiving complex visual information as a group of like things. If objects are similar size, shape, color, light, and other attributes, humans perceive them as groups and not separat items.
Look at images
Gestalt
Proximity
Things that are spaced closer together are seen as more related than things that are spaced farther apart.
Look at images online
Encoding
Initial process of converting sensory information into a form that can be stored in our memory. Ex: A person touches a hot stove and encodes the feeling of burning when they touched the stove-top.
Storage
Process of maintaining information in memory so that can it be accessed later. Ex: A person remembers the adress of their old house even after a couple of years.
Retrieval
Memory retrieval is how we access stored info in our brains. It’s mainly done through recall (pulling info without prompts) and recognition (using cues to help remember).
Ex: A person is in a gameshow and gets asked to identify the first president of the U.S to win $1, and they recall its George Washington.
Mnemonic Devices
Any learning technique that aids information retention or retrieval in the human memory, often by associating the information with something that is easier to remember. Ex: PEMDAS in math
Spacing Effect
A psychological phenomenon where learning and memory retention are enhanced when study sessions are spaced out over time, rather than crammed into a single, intense session. Ex: Studying 30 minutes everyday for a month for a test; rather than studying 6 hours the day before my test results in a higher grade.
Forgetting Curves
Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve is a graph that represents how memory decreases over time when there is no attempt to retain or retrieve the information. It shows that we tend to forget rapidly at first, and then the rate of forgetting slows down.
