Gleitman • Gross • Reisberg
Psychology
EIGHTH EDITION
Chapter 5
Perception
©2011 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Psychology Club Survey
Here is a link to the survey in Survey
Monkey:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NJ9L6B
S
This is 10 extra credits points.
You must bring me the screen shot for the
completed survey.
Chapter Topics
• How do Senses and Perception intertwine.
• Form Perception or literally seeimg
something: What Is It?
• Figure and ground: The Gestalt
• Sensory Percpetion
• Perceptual Constancy
• Distance Perception: Where Is It?
• Motion Perception: What Is It Doing?
Chapter Topics
• Perceptual Selection: Attention and
movement
• Emotional Perception
• Some Final Thoughts: Seeing, Knowing,
and the Perceiver’s Active Role
• Summary
Your Senses
You have 7 senses.
These are taste, touch, hearing, and
smell, vision.
There is also Proprioception. This is the
unconscious perception of movement and
spatial orientation arising from stimuli in
the body. This means how you know to
automatically move like you move.
Proprioception problems include
clumsiness, posture, knowing how much
pressure to use, etc.
Your Senses
The 7th sense is Vestibular.
This is the sensory system that provides
you the ability to have a sense of balance
and spatial orientation for the purpose of
coordinating movement with your balance.
This helps with gross motor skills (walking,
running), fine motor skills (holding objects
like a pencil), and visual spatial motor
skills (following a moving object).
Your Senses and Perception
Sensation is sensing your world through
those seven sensory states.
After you sense stimuli through your seven
senses, you must somehow perceive what
you just sensed.
Perception is the ways you interpret your
senses.
Sensation and Perception
https://youtu.be/QZUEwGNe0tE
Discussion.
Lets start with visual sensation and
perception.
Form Perception
• Recognition of forms begins the detection
of simple features.
• visual search tasks
• Recognition depends on more than a
checklist of features.
• It depends on how the perceiver has organized the
features, mental representations from past, how
we can categorize, how moving, and what we
expect to see.
The Brain and Perception
https://youtu.be/1xcvWSeZPbw
Dr Mark Changizi, Developmental
Neurobiologist
How your Brain Perceives Visual
Information
The Gestalt
The Gestalt is a school within psychology
Gestalt is concerned with the multitude of
aspects related to how animals problem
solve.
One area is the way animals perceive their
situations as an automatic response, and
later as our temperament and character
enter the problem solving.
Form Perception and Gestalt
• To organize (or parse) input, the perceiver
must analyze the visual scene.
• segregation of figure and ground
• Interpretive steps seem logical to the animal
but are based on what is literally seen, and
what factors in the animal may aid or regress
the perception.
Visual Figure and Ground
https://youtu.be/1BADot3Xb8s
Auditory Figure and Ground
https://youtu.be/_zQIWCU6tUc
Vision
Vision requires deciphering foreground
from background, recognizing objects in a
wide array of places, and accurately
interpreting spatial cues.
Optic nerve (located in the back of the
eye) connects the eye to the brain.
The optic nerve routes information via the
thalamus to the cerebral cortex (occipital
lobe), where visual perception occurs.
“What” and “Where”
• “What” system
• temporal lobe
• identification of visual objects, facial and
object recognition
“Where” system
• parietal lobe
• where stimulus is located or motion and
spatial awareness
Perceptual Constancy
• We perceive a stable world
• despite changes in viewing circumstances
that cause alteration to sensory information.
• size constancy
• even though it’s determined by size of distal object
and by viewing distance
• shape constancy
• even though the shape depends on viewing angle
• We have mental representations.
Unconscious Inference
• Evidence suggests we achieve constancy
through unconscious inference.
• It takes viewing circumstances (distance,
viewing angle, illumination) into account by
means of a simple calculation.
• We fill in the “gaps” with our perception.
• It can sometimes lead us astray.
• illusions
Psychological Misperceptions
Sensory Processing Difficulties.
https://youtu.be/1_Iuj8dr9oY
Temple Grandin
https://youtu.be/vwJc6HkP8fc
Distorted Body Image
https://youtu.be/litXW91UauE
Perceptual Disorders
https://youtu.be/DhrckKWmnTQ
Body Dysmorphic Disorder
On line Psychology Lab
http://opl.apa.org/Instructors/RegistrationC
onfirmation.aspx?x=9160
Class ID is 9160.
Attention
• Perception is selective.
• Selectivity is produced by orienting and
through central adjustments.
• Adjustments depend in part on our ability to
prepare ourselves by priming relevant
detectors and processing pathways.
• Perception allows us to decide what, in our
inner or outer world, to pay attention to.
Attention
• Thanks to this priming, perception is more
efficient for a stimulus that is attended to.
• Conversely, the perception of unattended
stimuli may be disrupted altogether.
• Studies demonstrate how little of unattended
stimuli we perceive.
• Change Blindness.
• Distorted Body Image, Thought-Action Fusion,
Sense of hopelessness, etc.
Other Modalities
• Different sense modalities have a lot in
common.
• For example, hearing
• involves feature analysis.
• Auditory stimuli, like visual stimuli, are often
ambiguous.
• Attention is important.
Final Thoughts
• Perception is not knowledge.
• Perception frequently contradicts what we
know.
• Knowledge and perception are mutually
influenced but are not the same thing.
• The perceiver and the knower are distinct in
many instances.
Concept Quiz
1) Why is it helpful for humans to be sensitive to many
different, and sometimes redundant, distance cues?
a) Different distance cues are important in different
situations.
b) Distance cues are usually misleading, and we need
backup systems to prevent visual illusions.
c) No distance cue, by itself, can provide interpretable
information about an object’s distance.
d) Each distance cue is only accurate for objects within
a specific distance range.
Concept Quiz
2) Direction-specific motion-detecting neurons in
the visual cortex are sensitive to motion
because they fire in response to:
a) changes in light intensity of a stimulus.
b) a stimulus moving across the neuron’s
receptive field on the retina.
c) voluntary movements of the eyes.
d) monocular distance cues.
Concept Quiz
3) Helmholtz argued that we achieve perceptual
constancy in the absence of higher-order
invariant cues because we make
____________ about visual stimuli.
a)
b)
c)
d)
visual constraints
visual illusions
unconscious inferences
conscious calculations
Concept Quiz
4) Which of the following phenomena is an
example of a knowledge-driven, top-down
perceptual process?
a)
b)
c)
d)
sensory memory
feature detection
proximal stimulus
priming effects
Concept Quiz
5) Visual processing in the brain is characterized
by _______________ processing, in which
multiple processes occur simultaneously.
a)
b)
c)
d)
stepwise
linear
parallel
hierarchical
Video Clips
This concludes the presentation
slides for Chapter 5
For more learning resources, visit the StudySpace at
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/psych/psychology8/