PSYCH 1XX3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: The Blind Spot, Action Potential, Change Blindness
16 Mar 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Humans rely more on vision than any other sense. Stages of light understanding: photoreceptor, photo-activation, neural activity, awareness. Fills in the void of unattended and missing information. The blind spot is filled in by the context: blind sight functions by subconscious activity in secondary visual pathway. We only pay attention to a limited set of information in the environment: just because we are taking in visual information, you do not use all of the information. This is an unconscious inference of our sophisticated system working: not necessarily reflective of what is going on in the outside world, it is reflective of our own system. Even with directed focus, attention limits lead us to miss information. Attention is a dialogue between bottom-up and top-down processing. Assumptions that the brain makes from an evolutionary perspective. We always assume that there is always a single light source, and we always assume that the light source is coming from above.
