PSY110 Psychology
Module 11 – Perceptual Organization: Constructing Our View of the World – Pages 121-137
Perception
Process that our brain uses to make meaning of what it senses
Gestalt Laws of
 Gestalts = patterns
Organization
 Ways of organizing pieces of information
o Closure
o Proximity
o Similarity
o Simplicity
 Sensations are put together to make something more meaningful than the separate
elements
Feature Analysis
Physiological process of the actual sensing and processing of shapes and edges to
identify what we see
Top-Down and
 Top-Down processing – guided by higher level knowledge, experience,
Bottom-Up
expectations, and motivations and the use of contextual clues
Processing
 Bottom-UP processing – processing of the individual components (feature
analysis) of what we see
Perceptual
 The brain takes into consideration distance when viewing an object
Constancy
Depth Perception
 Binocular disparity – produces 3D image allowing dept perception
 Motion Parallax – Relative position of close objects seem to change faster that far
objects
 Relative size – Larger objects appear closer
 Texture Gradient – Less detail object appear to be farther away
 Linear perspective – Parallel lines appear to converge as distance increases
 Motion perception – Change in size or change in position relative to observer
Perceptual Illusions
Contextual clues some times lead us to inaccurate perceptions
Interactivity 11-2
See Interactivity 11-2 on student CD
Subliminal
Perception of messages which we have no awareness
Perception
No reliable evidence to support this effect
ESP
Extra Sensory Perception
No reliable research to support claims
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Richard Goldman