CHAPTER 3: PERCEPTION

THE NATURE OF PERCEPTION

 PERCEPTION
 Define as experiences resulting from stimulation of the senses
 Gateway to all of the other cognitions
 PERCEPTION CAN:
 Change based on added information
 Involve a process similar to reasoning or problem solving
 Occur in conjunction with action
 Example: Crystal was jogging on the beach when she saw a “figure”. She
thought that it was a piece of driftwood. As she got closer, it turns out that
it was a beach umbrella.

PERCEPTION STARTS AT THE RECEPTORS: BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING

 The first step in perception is the stimulation of receptors by stimuli from the
environment.
 BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING
 Processing that begins with the stimulation of the receptors
 All of our sensory experiences, with the exception of certain situations, begins
with bottom-up processing
 Can be described physiologically or behaviorally
 SEQUENCE IN BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING: PHYSIOLOGICAL
 Stimulation of the receptors triggers a series of events in which electrical signals
are transmitted from the receptors towards the brain.
 Example: Perceiving the tree or a bird chirping occurs after electrical
signals that start in the receptors reach the brain.
 The initial effect of these signals in the cortex has been determined by recording
electrical signals from individual neurons.
 FEATURE DETECTORS
 Neurons in the cortex that respond best to simple shapes like lines or bars with
specific orientations
 First step in the brain’s response to object
 Example: When you look at an object such as a tree, neurons in the
visual cortex that respond to specific orientations fire to features of the
tree such as the trunk and branches.
 IRVING BIEDERMAN (1987)
 Proposed the behavioral approach that perception is created by combinations of
individual features
 RECOGNITION-BY-COMPONENTS (RBC) THEORY
 Proposed by Irving Biederman
 States that we perceive objects by perceiving elementary features called geons
 GEONS
 Perceptual building blocks that can be combined to create objects
 One of the characteristics of object perception, according to RBC, is that we can
recognize an object if we are able to perceive just a few of its geons.
  Example: Biederman showed that an airplane that has a total of nine
geons was recognized correctly about 78 percent of the time even if only
three geons were present, and 99 percent of the time if six geons were
present.

BEYOND BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING

 We can also perceive objects even if portions of the geons are obscured.
 PRINCIPLE OF COMPONENTIAL RECOVERY
 States that if we can recover an object’s geons, we can identify the object
 The flip side of this principle is that if we cannot see an object’s individual geons,
we cannot recognize the object
 Perception depends on additional information.
 TOP-DOWN PROCESSING
 Processing that begins with a person’s prior knowledge or expectations
 Involve in our ability to recognize object based on just a few geons, or when large
portions of the object are obscured
 MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES OF A BLOB
 Shows how top-down processing is involved in perceiving objects
 FEEDBACK SIGNALS
 Signals associated with a person’s knowledge and expectations that travel down
from higher centers to influence incoming signals
 PERCEPTION IS DETERMINED BY THREE SOURCES OF INFORMATION:
 Information originating from the stimulation of the receptors
 Additional information such as the context in which an object appears
 Knowledge or expectations of the perceiver
 2 DIFFERENT KINDS OF PERCEPTION
 Perception of the size of an object
 Perception of the intensity of an odor
 THE PERCEPTUAL SYSTEM TAKES INTO ACCOUNT THE FOLLOWING WHEN
PERCEIVING SIZE:
 Depth
 Size of the object relative to other objects in the environment
 SIZE CONSTANCY
 Perceive objects as remaining the same size even when they move to different
distances
 Perception of the size of an object does not depend solely on the size of the object’s
image on the receptors.
 ROBERT TEGHSOONIAN AND COWORKERS (1978)
 Asked participants in a laboratory situation to rate the odor intensity of different
odorants (chemical solutions with odors) and found that their participants gave
almost identical ratings for weak sniffs and for strong sniffs
 Concluded that participants take strength of their sniff into account in making
their ratings

USING KNOWLEDGE: TOP-DOWN PROCESSING

 TOP-DOWN PROCESSING
 Processing that depends on a person’s prior knowledge or expectations
 Example: A listener familiar with the English language and a listener
familiar with Spanish can receive identical sound stimuli but experience
different perceptions due to each listener’s experience with language.
 SPEECH SEGMENTATION
 A phenomenon in which an individual is able to tell when one word ends and the
next one begins
 HERMANN VON HEMHOLZT
 Propose a principle called the theory of unconscious inference
 THEORY OF UNCONSCIOUS INFERENCE
 States that some of our perceptions are the result of unconscious assumptions
that we make about the environment
 LIKELIHOOD PRINCIPLE
 We perceive the object that is most likely to have caused the pattern of stimuli we
have received
 GESTALT PSYCHOLOGISTS
 Proposed another approach on perception, 30 years after Hemholtz proposed his
theory of unconscious inference
 Concerned with perceptual organization
 THEORY OF PERCEPTUAL ORGANIZATION
 Indicate how elements in the environment are organized or group together to
create larger objects
 LAW OF GOOD CONTINUATION
 States that points, when connected, result in straight or smoothly curving lines
are seen as belonging together, and the line tend to be seen in such a way as to
follow the smoothest path
 Objects that are overlapped by other objects are perceived as continuing behind
the overlapping object
 Example: The Celtic knot pattern
 LAW OF PRAGNANZ
 From a German word which means “good figure”
 Also called the law of good figure or the law of simplicity
 States that every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting
structure is as simple as possible
 Example: The logo of the Olympics
 LAW OF SIMILARITY
 States that similar things appear to be grouped together
 LAW OF MEANINGFULNESS OR FAMILIARITY
 States that things that form patterns that are familiar or meaningful are likely to
be grouped together
 Example: The Dalmatian figure
 The Gestalt laws do not always work in certain situation especially with those that
involve an unusual arrangement of objects.
 HEURISTICS
 Rule of thumb that provide a best-guess solution to a problem
  Gestalt laws are called as such instead of laws
 Gestalt principles are deemed heuristics because they are best-guess rules, based on
how the environment is organized, that work most of the time, but not necessarily all of
the time.
 REGULARITIES IN THE ENVIRONMENT
 Characteristics of the environment that occur frequently
 2 TYPES OF REGULARITIES
 Physical regularities - regularly occurring physical properties of the environment.
 Semantic regularities - refer to the meanings of words or sentences. In perceiving
scenes, semantics refers to the meaning of a scene, or is often related to what
happens within a scene.
 STEPHEN PALMER (1975)
 Conducted an experiment using stimuli such as pictures in order to illustrate the
effect of semantic knowledge

NEURONS AND KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT

 BRAIN
 The human perceiving machine
 Contains some neurons that respond best to things that occur regularly in the
environment
 EXPERIENCE-DEPENDENT PLASTICITY
 Mechanism through which the structure of the brain is changed by experience
 COLIN BLAKEMORE AND GRAHAM COOPER (1970)
 Conducted an experiment that reshaped a kitten’s visual cortex to mainly
respond to verticals after continually being exposed in an environment consisting
of verticals
 FUSIFORM FACE AREA (FFA)
 An area in the temporal lobe that contains many neurons that responds best to
faces
 ISABEL GAUTHIER AND COWORKERS (1999)
 Determined whether this response to faces might be due to experience-
dependent plasticity by measuring the level of activity in the FFA in response to
faces and to objects called Greebles
 GREEBLES
 Are families of computer-generated “beings” that all have the same basic
configuration but differ in the shapes of their parts (just like faces)

REACHING FOR A CUP: THE INTERACTION BETWEEN PERCEIVING AND TAKING

ACTION
 MOVEMENT
 Adds a complexity to perception that isn't there when we are sitting in one place
 Helps us perceive objects in the environment more accurately
 Helps us perceive objects by revealing additional information about them
 Important because of the coordination that is continually occurring between
perceiving stimuli and taking action toward these stimuli
  PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCH
 Shown that there are two processing streams in the brain – one involved with
perceiving objects, and the other involved with locating and taking action toward
these objects
 2 PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCH METHOD
 Brain ablation - study of the effect of removing parts of the brain in animals.
 Neuropsychology - study of the behavior of people with brain damage
determining dissociations.
 LESLIE UNGERLEIDER AND MORTIMER MISHKIN (1982)
 Studied how removing part of a monkey’s brain affected its ability to identify an
object and to determine the object’s location
 Used the technique called brain ablation
 Presented monkeys with two tasks: an object discrimination problem and a
landmark discrimination problem
 2 PATHWAYS
 What pathway - pathway leading from the striate cortex to the temporal lobe, and
corresponds to the perception pathway.
 Where pathway - pathway leading from the striate cortex to the parietal lobe and
corresponds to the action pathway.
 One of the central procedures in neuropsychology is determining dissociations.
 DISSOCIATIONS
 Situations in which one function is absent while another function is present
 2 KINDS OF DISSOCIATIONS
 Single dissociations - can be studied in one person
 Double dissociations - require two or more people
 MILNER AND GOODALE (1995)
 Used the method of determining dissociations to study D.F., a 34-year-old
woman who suffer damage to her temporal lobe from carbon monoxide poisoning
caused by a gas leak in her home
 GIACOMO RIZZOLATTI AND COWORKERS (2006)
 Investigated how neurons in the monkey’s premotor cortex fired as the monkey
performed actions such as picking up a toy or a piece of food
 Found neurons in the monkey’s premotor cortex that fired not only when the
monkey picked up a piece of food, but also when the monkey observed the
experimenter picking up a piece of food

SOMETHING TO CONSIDER
 THE RESULTS OF GIACOMO RIZZOLATTI AND COWORKERS’ EXPERIMENT ARE
THE FOLLOWING:
1. Led to the discovery of mirror neurons
 MIRROR NEURONS
 Neurons that respond both when a monkey observes someone else (usually the
experimenter) grasping an object, such as food on a tray
  Are called mirror neurons because the neuron’s response to watching the
experimenter grasp an object is similar to the response that would occur if the
monkey were performing the action
2. Led to the discovery of audiovisual mirror neurons
 AUDIOVISUAL MIRROR NEURONS
 Neurons that respond to sounds that are associated with actions
 Neurons, also in the premotor cortex, respond when a monkey performs a hand
action and when it hears the sound associated with this action