Perception: the process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting sensations, enabling you to recognize meaningful objects and events.
- Bottom-up processing: driven by external sensory information
- Top-down processing: shaped by internal prior expectations
- Schema and perceptual set: internal factors that filter perceptions of the world (e.g. schema is shown by our ability rapidly recognize/categorize a dog; perceptual set is shown when we habitually view certain things in certain ways)
- Contexts, experiences, culture, expectations: external factors that filter perception of the world
Gestalt Organizing Principles
- How humansorganizetheirperceptualworld ("the whole is not equal to sum of parts")
- Closure: e.g. a broken circle is still viewed as a circle, not a broken line
- Figure and ground: e.g. two faces or a vase?
- Proximity: stimuli that are close to each other are perceived as a group, not multiple entities
- Similarity: stimuli that are similar to each other are perceived as a group
Attention
- Selective attention: the cocktail party effect (hearing your name said in a loud room)
- Inattentional blindness: e.g. can't see a gorilla walking by when focusing on a football game
- Change blindness: change that happens gradually cannot be noticed (due to inattention)
Depth Perception
- Binocular depth cues: retinal display (the difference between two retinal images) & convergence (the merging of the retinal images by the brain)
- Monocular depth cues: relative clarity, relative size, texture gradient, linear perspective, interposition (one thing blocking another)
Perceptual constancy: visual perceptual constancy maintain the perception of an object even when the images of the object in the visual field change.
Apparent movement: something can be perceived as moving even when it is not (e.g. relative speed, visual illusion)