week 3- perception, visual long term memory, and attention

Question 1

what is top down processing?

Answer 1

Top down processing- using past experiences can influence what and how you perceive

Question 2

what is bottom up processing?

Answer 2

Bottom up processing- using features of an external stimulus in what/how you perceive

Question 3

what is object occlusion?

Answer 3

Object occlusion- if an object is occluded by another object, if we still see part of it we know that its that object (occlusion in an image occurs when an object hides a part of another object)

Question 4

what is viewpoint invariance?

Answer 4

Viewpoint invariance- no matter what viewpoint we see an object from, we still know it’s the same object, an object can be identified from any angle

Question 5

what are the 3 theoretical viewpoints of perception?

Answer 5

1. Helmoltz’s Theory of Unconscious Inference
2. Gestalt Principles of Organization
3. Regularities of the Environment

Question 6

what is the likelihood principle in Helmoltz’s Theory of Unconscious Inference

Answer 6

based on our past experiences, what is the most likely interpretation of an image? -looking at Image 4, one would assume that after looking at the first picture, looking at it from the side, it would look like the second picture, even though it is fully possible that it could look like the third picture. But due to the likelihood principle, we know the second picture is most likely, so that is what our brain is most likely to interpret it as

Question 7

what is the principle of simplicity in Gestalt Principles of Organization?

Answer 7

→ Principle of Simplicity- what’s the simplest interpretation of what i’m looking at?
Example: looking at Image 5, you would think the top photo is a picture of the olympic rings, but it is possible it’s 9 shapes packed together. But, due to the simplicity principle, our past experiences tell us that the simplest interpretation is that it’s the olympic rings

Question 8

what is the principle of similarity in Gestalt’s Principles of Organization

Answer 8

things that look alike, our brain is more likely to group them together
Example: looking at the first picture below, one would say they see a square, but looking at the second picture below, one would say they see multiple columns

Question 9

what does the third principle, regularities of the environment, mean?

Answer 9

characteristics of the environment that occurs frequently, so our experience with those regularities inform our perceptions

Question 10

describe physical regularities in the “Regularities of the Environment” principle. give an example.

Answer 10

regularly occurring physical properties of the environment
ex. Ames room (see image 7)

Question 11

describe semantic regularities in the “Regularities of the Environment” principle. give an example.

Answer 11

the characteristics associated with the functions carried out in the different types of scenes
Example: looking at Image 8, if someone asked you to identify the three images within the image to the left, one would be much faster at finding the bread because the environment is set up so bread would normally be there

Question 12

what is experience dependent plasticity?

Answer 12

our brain is changing with our experiences, it adjusts to our experiences

Question 13

what is the restricting developmental environment of cats?

Answer 13

if you restrict its experience with a stimulus, then that part of the brain will adapt or “take over” controlling a different part of the body (ex. If it loses its right finger, then the part of the brain that controls the right finger will adapt and start controlling the left finger)

Question 14

what role does expertise have in perception? give a study as an example

Answer 14

SEE IMAGE 9
Ex. study conducted where people were brain scanned while looking at faces and then looking at greebles, there was a lot of activity when looking at faces but not alot while looking at greebles (because we don’t know what they are). They took participants and trained them on the greebles, then were put back in the brain scanner. The brain adapted and showed less activity for faces and more activity for the greebles

Question 15

what are the two pathways thoughts get pushed down to during perception?

Answer 15

-once we’ve perceived something, that info gets pushed down two different paths in the brain
One is called the “what pathway”(involved in recognition and memory) and then the second one is the where pathway (involved in programming of action)
-for the image, the what pathways is involved in a) and the where pathway is involved in b) and c)
SEE IMAGE 10

Question 16

what lobe is the what pathway in?

Answer 16

temporal lobe

Question 17

what lobe is the where pathway in?

Answer 17

parietal

Question 18

describe the step by step pathways in the brain

Answer 18

we perceive something in our occipital lobe. it then gets pushed down two pathways. WHERE- is pushed down the dorsal pathway to the parietal lobe. WHAT- is pushed down the ventral pathway to the temporal lobe.
SEE IMAGE 11

Question 19

How much of our visual experience do we store in memory?

Answer 19

-in reality, it depends

Question 20

what is change blindness?

Answer 20

a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when a change in a visual stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it (ex. gorilla ball passing video)

Question 21

what determines what we remember?

Answer 21

-what we remember is determined by what we think were supposed to pay attention to, its determined by what we think is relevant right then and there

Question 22

describe Standing’s (1973) study on visual long term memory

Answer 22

-Standing (1973) presented students with 10 000 different images of scenes (forest, antarctica, etc.), then they were tested on their knowledge of those scenes by using a two alternative forced choice test (you get two choices and you have to decide “which one did you see earlier today”) – 83% of them got it correct

Question 23

what is the limitation with Standing’s study?

Answer 23

for the test, they didn’t control for an alternative strategy people might have used – the fact that the participants might have known they didn’t see any, for example, beach related scenes

Question 24

describe Brady and Colleagues’ (2008) study on visual long term memory.

Answer 24

-Brady and Colleagues (2008) presented participants with 2500 images of random objects then tested them using the two alternative forced choice tests. They used 3 different types of “lures” (the wrong picture in the forced choice test): Novel (lure comes from a different “category” than the actual picture), Exemplar (one image was the one they saw, and the other image is the same category but different image – they have to remember what the colour was, the shape, etc.), and State (exact same item as the one they saw, but in a different state)
SEE IMAGE 12

Question 25

what were the findings of Brady and Colleagues’ study?

Answer 25

-the data was similar to the data stanley recorded, but they controlled for stanley’s limitations
also, SEE IMAGE 13

Question 26

what is the dichotic listening task?

Answer 26

the process of receiving different auditory messages presented simultaneously to each ear

Question 27

what is the cocktail party effect?

Answer 27

the ability of people to focus on a single talker or conversation in a noisy environment. (ex. You’re at a party and you hear your name from across the room)

Question 28

when does the cocktail party effect only happen?

Answer 28

this only happens when something is extremely relevant to you

Question 29

what is donald broadbent’s (1958) filter model of attention?

Answer 29

messages → sensory store → filter (all unattended information gets filtered out) → detector → memory
SEE IMAGE 14

Question 30

what was the limitation of donald broadbent’s (1958) filter model of attention?

Answer 30

how does this account for the cocktail party effect? it doesn’t

Question 31

what is Anne Treisman’s (1964) Attenuation Model of Attention?

Answer 31

messages → sensory store → ATTENUATOR (instead of a filter like donald said, so it doesnt completely filter everything out, just DAMPENS the noise), then due to this dampening, unattended messages can seep out to the detector → detector (with an unattended message) → memory
SEE IMAGE 16

Question 32

what is overt attention?

Answer 32

what one is explicitly paying attention to in the world around them

Question 33

what is covert attention?

Answer 33

the capacity to pay attention to things that you are not explicitly focused on

Question 34

what is fixation eye movement?

Answer 34

fixing on one particular thing (ex. Watching a plant grow)

Question 35

what is saccadic eye movement?

Answer 35

rapid, ballistic movements of the eyes that abruptly change the point of fixation (ex. reading)

Question 36

what is stimulus salience?

Answer 36

the features of objects in the environment attract our attention, based on whatever instruction you receive, what stimulus is what you should be paying attention to

Question 37

is stimulus salience an example of top down or bottom up processing?

Answer 37

bottom up

Question 38

what is stimulus salience mixed with cognitive factors?

Answer 38

same as stimulus salience, but using past experiences to guide how you perceive something

Question 39

is stimulus salience mixed with cognitive factors an example of top down or bottom up processing?

Answer 39

top down

Question 40

what was michael posner et al.’s precuing paradigm study?

Answer 40

students looked at a computer screen where things would appear on the screen, but they were asked to focus on the plus sign in the middle the whole time, they told participants they were using an eye tracker so they couldn’t cheat. An arrow would appear either in the right direction of the next image or the wrong direction, participants were asked to guess if arrow was correct or false
Findings- participants were faster at guessing the valid arrow than the invalid arrow, showing they had covert attention

Question 41

are we good at divided attention (focusing on two things at once)?
give an example

Answer 41

not very good (major example – being on your phone while driving)

Question 42

what is the feature integration theory?

Answer 42

SEE IMAGE 16
-basically just means when we look at an object, our brains interpret the features of the object separately (during the preattentive stage), then the features are combined in our brain (during the focused attention stage) to form one image (perception)

Question 43

give an example of the Feature Integration Theory using image 17

Answer 43

looking at Image 17, during the preattentive stage, our brains interpreted the colour, the size, the shape, if its 3d or 2d, etc., then in the focused attention stage, our brains combine all those features to form our perception of it as a red ball

Question 44

what is superimposed stimuli?

Answer 44

looking at Image 18, we are not paying to both the face and the house at the same time, what we decide to pay attention to is what is perceived