Proseminar in Cognitive Psychology
Module 2: Perceptual Processes
PSYC 5665-001
Lewis O. Harvey, Jr.
Fall 2016
Wednesday, 9:00–10:40
Thatcher Illusion (Thompson, 1980)
Proseminar Module 2: Perceptual Processes
Psychology 5665-001
Fall 2016
Lewis O. Harvey, Jr.
9:00–10:40 Wednesday
MUEN E317
This course is one module of the six-module proseminar sequence for first and second
year graduate students. It is organized around original papers and student presentations.
You may want to refer to an undergraduate text such as by Jeremy Wolfe (Wolfe et al.,
2012). There are copies around the department that you can borrow if need be.
The sixth edition of the APA Publication Manual (American Psychological Association.,
2010) is an indispensable book for all graduate students and researchers who are writing
scholarly manuscripts. You should get one early in your graduate career.
Goals: The objective of this course is to introduce fundamental issues in cognitive
psychology regarding how we process sensory information and recognize objects. We
will read and discuss papers that address critical issues on these topics. Students will be
expected to email at least 3 questions or topics of discussion to the class email list prior to
each class, and one person will be selected in advance to present the paper and distill the
basic ideas for the class. This individual will also provide 2-3 lead-off questions for the
whole class to discuss. Presentations and class participation will count for 70% of the
grade while a take-home exam will count for the remaining 30%.
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21.Aug.2016
Proseminar Module 2: Perceptual Processes
Psychology 5665-001
Fall 2016
Lewis O. Harvey, Jr.
9:00–10:40 Wednesday
MUEN E317
Reading Assignments
1.
24 August 2016, Wednesday
Introduction
2.
31 August 2016, Wednesday
Detection Theory
(Swets, 1961; Swets, Tanner, & Birdsall, 1961)
3.
7 September 2016, Wednesday
Detection Theory
(Wixted & Mickes, 2014)
4.
14 September 2016, Wednesday
Spatial Vision
(Blakemore & Campbell, 1969; Campbell & Robson, 1968)
5.
21 September 2016, Wednesday
Spatial Vision
(Wilson, McFarlane, & Phillips, 1983)
6.
28 September 2016, Wednesday
Object Perception
(Schyns, Bonnar, & Gosselin, 2002)
7.
5 October 2016, Wednesday
Object Perception
(Bruce & Young, 2012)
8.
12 October 2016, Wednesday
Object Perception
(Kriegeskorte, Mur, & Bandettini, 2008)
9.
19 October 2016, Wednesday
Object Perception
(Wolfrum, Wolff, Lücke, & von der Malsburg, 2008)
10. 26 October 2016, Wednesday
Auditory Frequency Bands
(Plomp, 1976)
11. 2 November 2016, Wednesday
Perception of Pitch
(Shepard, 1982)
12. 9 November 2016, Wednesday
Consonance and Dissonance
(Plomp & Levelt, 1965)
13. 16 November 2016, Wednesday
Perception of Speech
(Eimas & Corbit, 1973; Hickok & Poeppel, 2007; Poeppel, Emmorey, Hickok, &
Pylkkänen, 2012)
14. 23 November 2016, Wednesday
Fall Break
15. 30 November 2016, Wednesday
Attention
(Most & Astur, 2007; Most, Scholl, Clifford, & Simons, 2005)
16. 7 December 2016, Wednesday
Attention
(Abrams, Davoli, Du, Knapp Iii, & Paull, 2008; Abrams & Weidler, 2014)
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21.Aug.2016
Proseminar Module 2: Perceptual Processes
Psychology 5665-001
Fall 2016
Lewis O. Harvey, Jr.
9:00–10:40 Wednesday
MUEN E317
Class Presentations
When leading a discussion of a research paper in class it is helpful to emphasize the
answers to five questions:
1.
What question(s) was (were) the author(s) trying to answer?
Many times authors of papers unnecessarily limit the scope of their paper or
base their experiment on a false premise. An example is the question “does
recognition memory have one or two processes?” This question assumes that
one of these two possibilities is correct and ignores the possibility that more
than two processes are involved. A much broader question would be “How
does recognition memory work?” When you discuss a paper, do not take the
author’s question at face value; rephrase it in your own terms.
2.
What did the author(s) do to answer the question?
This topic involves method and procedure. Focus on the parts of the procedure
that are important and ignore details that are irrelevant. The central idea of
operationism (Bridgman, 1927; Garner, Hake, & Eriksen, 1956) is that
concepts have no scientific meaning beyond the operations used to measure
them. For example, the authors may have measured the reaction time of
observers making judgments about whether or not a test face had been
previously seen. Distinguish what is actually measured (reaction time) from the
interpretation the authors put on it (e.g., confidence or speed of processing). In
other words, distinguish what the authors actually did from what they think
they did.
3.
What did the author(s) find?
In an APA style paper, this question is answered in the results section. The
results are the actual data either in raw form or summarized by means that
allow comparing relevant experimental conditions. For example, the results
might be the mean reaction time for testing in the morning and mean reaction
time for testing in the afternoon.
4.
What did the author(s) conclude?
This question is handled in the discussion section of the paper and is the part
that deserves careful consideration. Do the results, combined with what the
authors actually measured, justify the conclusions? One should feel free to
contradict the authors if their conclusions are not justified.
5.
What is your evaluation?
Give us your opinion and evaluation of the paper.
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21.Aug.2016
Proseminar Module 2: Perceptual Processes
Psychology 5665-001
Fall 2016
Lewis O. Harvey, Jr.
9:00–10:40 Wednesday
MUEN E317
References
Abrams, R. A., Davoli, C. C., Du, F., Knapp Iii, W. H., & Paull, D. (2008). Altered
vision near the hands. Cognition, 107(3), 1035-1047. doi:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.09.006
Abrams, R. A., & Weidler, B. J. (2014). Trade-offs in visual processing for stimuli near
the hands. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 76(2), 383-390. doi:
10.3758/s13414-013-0583-1
American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American
Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
Blakemore, C., & Campbell, F. W. (1969). On the existence of neurones in the human
visual system selectively sensitive to the orientation and size of retinal images.
Journal of Physiology (London), 203(1), 237–260.
Bridgman, P. W. (1927). The Logic of Modern Physics. New York: Macmillan.
Bruce, V., & Young, A. W. (2012). Chapter 6: Face Perception Face Perception (pp.
253–313). New York, New York: Psychology Press.
Campbell, F. W., & Robson, J. G. (1968). Application of Fourier analysis to the visibility
of gratings. Journal of Physiology, 197(3), 551–566.
Eimas, P. D., & Corbit, J. D. (1973). Selective adaptation of linguistic feature detectors.
Cognitive Psychology, 4(1), 99-109. doi: 10.1016/0010-0285(73)90006-6
Garner, W. R., Hake, H. W., & Eriksen, C. W. (1956). Operationism and the concept of
perception. Psychological Review, 63(3), 149159.
Hickok, G., & Poeppel, D. (2007). The cortical organization of speech processing. Nat
Rev Neurosci, 8(5), 393-402.
Kriegeskorte, N., Mur, M., & Bandettini, P. A. (2008). Representational similarity
analysis - connecting the branches of systems neuroscience. Frontiers in Systems
Neuroscience, 2, 1–24. doi: 10.3389/neuro.06.004.2008
Most, S. B., & Astur, R. S. (2007). Feature-based attentional set as a cause of traffic
accidents. Visual Cognition, 15(2), 125-132. doi: 10.1080/13506280600959316
Most, S. B., Scholl, B. J., Clifford, E. R., & Simons, D. J. (2005). What You See Is What
You Set: Sustained Inattentional Blindness and the Capture of Awareness.
Psychological Review, 112(1), 217-242.
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Proseminar Module 2: Perceptual Processes
Psychology 5665-001
Fall 2016
Lewis O. Harvey, Jr.
9:00–10:40 Wednesday
MUEN E317
Plomp, R. (1976). Aspects of tone perception: a psychophysical study. New York:
Academic Press.
Plomp, R., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1965). Tonal consonance and critical bandwidth. Journal
of the Acoustical Society of America, 38(4), 548–560.
Poeppel, D., Emmorey, K., Hickok, G., & Pylkkänen, L. (2012). Towards a new
neurobiology of language. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of
the Society for Neuroscience, 32(41), 14125-14131. doi:
10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3244-12.2012
Schyns, P. G., Bonnar, L., & Gosselin, F. (2002). Show me the features! Understanding
recognition from the use of visual information. Psychological Science, 13(5), 402409.
Shepard, R. N. (1982). Geometrical approximations to the structure of musical pitch.
Psychological Review, 89(4), 305–333.
Swets, J. A. (1961). Is there a sensory threshold? Science, 134(3473), 168–177.
Swets, J. A., Tanner, W. P., Jr., & Birdsall, T. G. (1961). Decision processes in
perception. Psychological Review, 68(5), 301340.
Thompson, P. G. (1980). Margaret Thatcher: A new illusion. Perception, 9(4), 483–484.
Wilson, H. R., McFarlane, D. K., & Phillips, G. C. (1983). Spatial frequency tuning of
orientation selective units estimated by oblique masking. Vision Research, 23(9),
873–882.
Wixted, J. T., & Mickes, L. (2014). A signal-detection-based diagnostic-feature-detection
model of eyewitness identification. Psychological Review, 121(2), 262-276. doi:
10.1037/a0035940
Wolfe, J. M., Kluender, K. R., Levi, D. M., Bartoshuk, L. M., Herz, R. S., Klatzky, R. L.,
. . . Merfeld, D. M. (2012). Sensation and Perception (3rd ed.). Sunderland,
Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates, Inc.
Wolfrum, P., Wolff, C., Lücke, J., & von der Malsburg, C. (2008). A recurrent dynamic
model for correspondence-based face recognition. Journal of Vision, 8(7), 1–18.
doi: 10.1167/8.7.34
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