PS260 Study Guide - Final Guide: Davidoff, Synesthesia, Sensory System
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sIan Shaughnessy
Cognitive Psychology
January 9th 2013
Chapter 1
Cognitive Processes
Perception – The set of front-end processes through which you organize and interpret incoming
information
Attention – The set of processes through which you focus incoming information
Immediate Memory – Short term or working memory
Chapter 2
Sensation
- Early Processing
- Physiological (Neuronal)
Perception
- Later Processing
- Psychological (interpretive)
Bottom-up Processing
- Flow of information that proceeds from the stimulus to the neural activity driven by this
stimulus to its eventual identification.
- AKA data driven processing
-Stimulus leads to a precept
Top-down processing
-The processes whereby we bring to bear what we expect, what we know, and what we
experience from the surrounding context in determining what it is we’re sensing and
subsequently perceiving.
- AKA Conceptually-driven processing
Are Our Perceptions Constructions?
Constructive view
-Psychological roots (Helmholtz)
-Emphasizes the role of active construction and interpretation in arriving at a three-dimensional
percept of the world.
-Top-down processing based
Direct View
- Proposed by J.J. Gibson
- What we perceive about our visual environment is picked up directly
- Bottom-up based because it emphasizes that the actual data of our environment is picked up by
visual mechanisms
The Basic Tasks of Visual Perception
- Palmer separates the processes of visual perception into two major subsets
1. Pre-attentive Processing
-Before attention is directed at a stimulus array
-Involves the organization of an incoming stimulus array into discrete perceptual parts and
elements
2. Post-attentive Processing
-After attention is directed at a stimulus array
-Involves identification and further processing of these elements and their categorization
Perceptual Organizational Processes
-Palmer suggests that when we a confronted with a stimulus array, the first thing we try to do is
to impose structure on it.
-In other words, figuring out what goes together and what does not
Grouping and Region Segmentation
Principles of visual organization
1. Proximity – tendency for objects that are near one and other to be grouped together
2. Similarity – tendency for similar objects to be grouped together
3. Good continuation – tendency to perceive lines as flowing naturally in a single direction
4. Closure – How we tend to complete the incomplete, perceptually connecting contours
5. Common fate – How we group elements together if they are moving in the same direction
6. Common Region – How elements that belong to a common designated area are group together
7. Synchrony – Grouping elements that occur at the same time
8. Element Connectedness – How elements are grouped together if they are connected to other
elements
Palmer tested these principles with a repetition discrimination task where participants had to
indicate as quickly as possible whether repeated elements were circles or squares.
Figure-Ground
- Tendency to segment a visual scene as a figure superimposed on a background
Global Precedence