Unit 4 Notes:

- Bottom-up Processing: Analysis that begins with the sensory receptors and works up to the
brain’s integration of sensory information.
- Top Down Processing: Information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when
we construct perceptions drawing on our experience and expectations.
- Humans are not aware of all the stimuli in the environment. Humans unconsciously acquire
11,000,000 bits of information per second and only consciously process about 40 of those bits.
- Selective Attention: The ability to only consciously focus on certain bits of info we deem
necessary.
- Selective Inattention:
o Inattentional Blindness- Failing too see visible objects when our attention is directed
elsewhere.
o This can be good and bad.
o We can really focus on what interests us.
o However, we really focus, we can “miss the forest for the trees”.
- How do we make use of information from the environment? We do it via Transduction.
- Transduction: 3 steps. 1-Receive info from the environment. 2-Transform the stimulation to
neural impulses. 3-
- Absolute Threshold: The minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus. Must be
able to determine change at lest 50% of the time.
- Signal Detection Theory: A theory predicting how and when we detect the presence of a faint
stimulus amid background stimulation. This assumes there is no one absolute threshold, but the
threshold detection caries through a person’s experience, expectations, motivations, and
alertness.
- Stimuli that you cannot detect 50% of the time may be considered “Subliminal”
- Subliminal means that it is underneath the level of conscious perception.
- Difference Threshold: The minimum difference people can detect between two stimuli.
- Sensory Adaptation: Diminished sensitivity as a consequence of constant stimulation (Ex: Nose
blind). It helps up to detect important changes in our environment.
- Emotional Adaptation: After looking at something that portrays a specific emotional long
enough, other images will seem to convey the opposite emotion.
- Perceptual Set: A mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not the other.
- Concerning Rods and Cones: You will need to know their role in vision. You will need to know
that the cones have a more direct rout to the optic nerve and the brain. They connect to ONE
bipolar cell that activates a ganglion cell that sends info to the optic nerve. Rods share a bipolar
cell. They do not transmit as much fine detail to the brain as cones.
- Images reach the eye and are processed along to the brain.
- Parallel Processing: The processing of many aspects of a problem simultaneously. The brain’s
natural mode of information processing for many functions, including vision. This contrast with
step-by-step (serial) processing.
- Parallel Processing is the seamless and holistic integration of conscious and unconscious
information that allows us to understand our environment and quickly reaction to and recognize
our world.
- Color Vision: Objects reflect color. A green apple actually absorbs all the rays of light except for
green. The green rays are bounced back to your eyes. Only 1 in 50 people are color deficient,
typically males.
- Young-Helmholtz Trichromatic Theory: The retina contains three color receptors. One sensitive
to red, green, and blue respectively. When stimulated in combination, they can produce the
perception of any color.
- Opponent Process Theory: Opposing retinal processes (red-green, yellow-blue, white-black)
enable color vision. Some cells are stimulated by green, but inhibited by red; others are
inhibited by green and stimulated by red. The color pairs are so strong, that it one of the colors
is stimulated, the other will not fire (this is why we do not see reddish-greens or blueish-
yellows). The “After Image Effect” helps us see how the opposing colors work when color
receptors become fatigued.
- By combining these 2 theories, we have a good idea as to how color vision works.
- Gestalt is a powerful way of understanding how we perceive information.
o An organized whole: The whole is greater than the parts.
o Emphasized our tendency to integrate pieces of information into a meaningful whole
(i.e. The Necker Cube).
- Figure-Ground: The organization of the visual field into objects (figures) that stand out from
their surroundings (ground). Where do we see figures? Where do we see the ground?
- Grouping: The perceptual set tendency to organize stimuli into coherent groups.
o Proximity: Group nearby figures together.
o Continuity: Perceive smooth, continuous patterns rather than discontinuous ones.
o Closure: We fill in the gaps to create a complete object.
- Depth Perception: The ability to see objects in three dimensions although the images that strike
the retina are 2 dimensional. Allows us to judge distance.
- Binocular Cues: Depth cues such as retinal disparity, that depend on the use of 2 eyes. We use
these cues to judge depth perception.
- Retinal Disparity: Brain’s ability to compute distance. Because your eyes are 2.5 inches apart,
your retinas receive slightly different images of the world. The greater the disparity, the closer
the image must be.
- Monocular Cues: Depth cues such as interposition and linear perspective, available to either eye
alone.
- Depth Perception is partly innate. We are born with a certain level of depth perception but it
grows and evolves as we get older.
- Interposition: Judging something’s distance by its relation to another object. If something is in
front of something else the thing in front is closer.
- Perceptual Constancies: Our ability to keep information about objects steady in our minds even
when the environment changes. 4 constancies-
o Color Constancy
o Brightness Constancy
o Shape Constancy
o Size Constancy
- Perceptual Adaptation: In vision, the ability to adjust to artificially displaced or even inverted
views.
- Audition: Sense of hearing.
- Frequency: The number of sound wavelengths that pass a point in a given time (per second).
- Pitch: Determined by a wavelength’s frequency. A tone’s experienced highness or lowness. Long
wavelengths have a low frequency and a low pitch. Shor wavelengths have a high frequency and
high pitch.
- We measure sound in decibels. Sound must cross 0 decibels to break hearing threshold. Normal
conversation is about 60 decibels. A train passing is about 100 decibels.
- Sensorineural Hearing Loss: Hearing loss caused by damage to the cochlea’s receptor cells or to
the auditory nerves. This is called nerve deafness. Caused by heredity, aging, and loud noises.
- Cochlear Implant: A device for converting sounds into electrical signals and stimulating the
auditory nerve through electrodes threaded into the cochlea (not a hearing aid).
- Conduction Hearing Loss: Hearing loss due to damage to the mechanical system that conducts
sounds to the cochlea.
- Loudness is determined by the number of hair cells vibrated in the cochlea. Often times those
with poor hearing can still hear loud sounds quite well, but the softer sounds cannot be picked
up by their auditory nerves.
- 2 Theories on Pitch:
o Place Theory: We hear different pitches because sounds trigger movement at different
places along the basilr membrane.
o High frequencies produce large vibrations near the beginning of the cochlea’s
membrane.
o Low frequencies vibrate more of the membrane, including the back.
- Sense of touch is vital to survival. Touch is a mix of skin sensations; those being pressure,
warmth, cold, and pain.
- Pain is a powerful part of touch, it is vital to survival.
- How do we experience pain?
o Gate Control Theory: A theory developed by Ronal Melzack and Patrick Wall. The theory
states that we feel pain by using specialized nociceptors (sensory receptors) to sense
pain: hurtful temps, pressure, or chemicals.
o Spinal cord contains small nerve fibers that send pain info to the brain. It also contains
larger fibers that conduct other signals.
o When in pain, the large fibers can control the gateway of pain and stop the small fibers
from sending pain messages to the brain.
- We can use the biopsychosocial approach to determine ho we feel pain. Biological influences
have the biggest impact but psychological influences such as a parent’s reaction do as well.
Parents who care for their child and rush them off to take care of a wound may influence how
we feel pain and our tolerance for it. Additionally, the culture you grow up in may not tolerate
pain and may affect your pain tolerance and how you feel pain.
- Olfaction: Our sense of smell. We experience olfaction through a chemical process, much like
taste.
- We smell when air reaches a cluster of 20 million receptor cells at top of our nasal cavity. These
cells have axons that send info to the brain. Info bypasses the thalamus and goes directly to the
sensorimotor cortex.
- The attractiveness of a smell is determined through learned associations.
- Body position and movement will affect sensation and perception
- Kinesthesia: The system for sensing the position and movement of individual body parts.
Receptors for kinesthesia are found in muscles, joints, and tendons.
- Vestibular Sense: Our ability to determine position and movement. It monitors your head’s (and
therefore your body’s) position and movement.
- Your semicircular canals in your inner ear, which contain fluid, connect with your cochlea.
- The movement of the fluid when your body talks to your cerebellum determines body position.
- Our senses have sensory interaction. Sensory interaction is the principle that one sense may
influence another, as when the smell of food influences its taste.
- Sometimes we can be confused by what we sense and perceive.
- McGurk Effect: Sometimes the eyes and ears disagree. See a speaker saying one syllable and
hear them say another. We blend the 2 together.
- See “ga”, hear “ba”, and perceive “da”.
- Ex: Watching a poorly connected internet video where the sounds don’t match up with the
mouth trips us up.
- Embodied Cognition: In psychological science, the influence of body sensations, gestures, and
other states on cognitive preferences and judgements.
o Holding a heavy clipboard, compared to a light one makes a job applicant feel more
important.
o After getting a cold shoulder from people, subjects perceive rooms colder than warmer.
o Sometimes these senses become joined/jumbled and leads to Synesthesia.
- Synesthesia: A condition that blends senses, such as hearing colors.