AP Psychology Unit 2- Perception and Thinking

focusing conscious awareness on a particular stimulus as opposed to the whole experience (our conciousness focuses on one thing at a time, processing roughly 40 bits of information out of 11,000,000 conciously- the rest goes on the intuitive unconcious- track.)

Ex: we may THINK we can fully attend to a conversation or a class lecture while texting but our selective attention shifts a lot, even though we may think it does not (It shifts to what we see as important)

Experiment: class lecture of 50 watching a 10 minute video, 25 has their phones silenced and the rest are randomly assigned to text and see on their phones. They take a quiz on the lecture and the silenced phones win.

your ability to attend to only one voice within a sea of guests as you chat with someone. But when another voice calls your name our cognitive radar, operating on your mind's other track, takes the voice to conscious track)

Ex of when could have helped: 2009, Northwest Airline pilots lost track of time in conversation, focused on that and ignored the alarmed air traffic controllers attempts to reach them, causing them to over-fly the plane by 150 miles. (calling their name may have helped)

Rapid toggling between complex activities wear out and delays us as brain areas (vital to driving when driver texts, for example) decrease by an average of 37%. (our attention is shifting constantly)

- Texting while driving is in 60% of americans

-before 58% of crashes, distraction occured

-talking to passengers makes risk of accident 1.6x higher

-being on phone makes it 4x higher, like a drunk driver

-haul trucks texting makes it 23x higher

THINK: Magicians, theives use this, direct attention elsewear and then..

failing to see visible objects when our attention is directly elsewhere

Study: Ulric Neisser and RObert Becklen and Daniel Cervane showed people a 1-minute video of basketball players tossing a ball, 3 in white or black shirts each. They were told to press a key every time they saw a black-shirted person pass the ball. So focused didn't notice woman holding an umbrella walking across the screen. (when later replayed, shock)

Ex: 24 radiologists looking at cancer nodules in lung scans, 20 of them did not see the gorilla in the corner.

a form of inattentional blindness- failing to notice changes in the enviroment

Ex: after brief visual interruption, don't notice changes

ExL person giving directions, two workers walk through the people talking with a door, the person who is seeking directions is switched with one of the workers, but the speaker who is giving directions does not notice.

A mental predisposition, or lens, to percieve one thing and not another. (A set of mental tendencies and assumptions that affects, top-down, what we her, taste, feel and see.) "mind over mind"

Ex: 12 Either see B or 13 depending on how you read it-

predisposed reader direction

A 13 C

14

Ex: playing backwards music, when you tell students what to look for, it changes their mental predisposition, what they are going to percieve, conciously.

Hearing:

Ex: Pilot says "cheer up" co-pilot expecting a "gear up" raised the wheels before off the ground

Taste:

Ex: Kids think fries taste better when they are in a McDonald's bag as opposed to a white bag.

See:

Ex: If newspaper publishes something about seeing a monster and an image, claiming it the best photos ever, people who saw it and believed would see a similar photo and think it is a monster. Skeptics would not and would see it as a tree limb.

Etc....

a learned concept or cognitive framework that helps organize and interpret unfamiliar information. (It predisposes out patterns of thinking to be a certain way)

Ex: preexisting schemas for spiders, when dog brush by you, tickle, think it is a spider, affects top-down touch perception for ambiguous sensations

Ex: stereotypes...(Baby called David perceived stronger as when same baby called Diana)

Context: How our perceptions are affected by different contexts (creates an expectation, top-down)

Lee Ross- "Ever notice that when you're driving you hate pedestrians but when you're a pedestrian you hate drivers?"

Ex: Hearing a noise interrupted by "eel on the wagon"- percieve eel as well, or "eel on the orange" as peel. Ex: Cultural contexts- western vs Indian, etc

Ex: Violinists say prefer new violins, but when blind and hear, pick old.

gives us energy for a goal- can bias our interpretations

Ex: desirable objects may seem closer (like water when thirsty) - Closeness increases desire

Ex: to be climbed hill seems steeper when wearing a heavier backpack or longer distance. But when person looses weight stairs seem less steep.

Ex: softball appears bigger when you hit it well, or when athletes focus on a target, its bigger

Shoves our perceptions in one direction or another

Ex: Sad music, percieve sad meanings in homophonic words- mourning rather than morning, die rather than dye.

Ex: cheerful music speeds up identification of happy emotion words

Ex: Hungry, see neutral objects as dangerous (gun, for ex), or find larger bodies more attractive

Ex: Made to feel upset after subliminally seeing a scowling face, percieve a neutral face as less likeable.

Perception: perceptual organization and interpretation

an organize whole. Gestalt psychologists emphasized our tendency to integrate peices of information into meaningful wholes.

Ex: looking straight- we cannot separate the percieved scene into our left and right fields of view. (Our concious- perception is a seamless scence- a whole)

-Our brain registers this info and then constructs and filters it- it makes programing AI to be like humans difficult because of this.

"The whole may exceed the sum of it's parts" (Ex, necker cube)

sensations are only stimuli- for example, in vision, wedges of objects. The circles, lines and cubes, however, are all a perception in our mind)

Sensations are dissambled to info bitss that our brain resembles to create its own mode of the world- our assumptions (such as the relationship between distance and size) can lead us astray

the organization of the visual field into objects (the figures) that stand out from their surroundings (the ground)

Ex: writing=figure, page=ground (2 dimensional?)

Ex: hearing one voice= figure among others=ground

Sometimes the same stimuli can trigger more than one perception:

Ex (image): 175, 2.1-9 reversible figure and ground(1st see vase against black or faces against white)

ASK: Adds meaning to stimuli?

the perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into coherent groups- a meaningful form that helps to perceive how the whole differs from the sum of the parts.

There are 3 times of methods used in grouping:

Similarity: things that took a like

Clousure- the complete whole, causing the object to seem blocked.

Proximity- the closeness of certain stimuli

the ability to see objects in 3 dimensions although the images that strike the retina are two-dimensional; allows us to judge distance.

Ex: estimate distance of an oncoming car

crawling, no matter when it begins, increases an infant's wariness of heights- gaze down, more likely to see hazards- evolved. Similar results found in kittens with no visual experience (not learned)

Idea by psychologist Eleanor Gibson, a labratory device for testing depth perception in infants and young animals (a model)

a depth cue such as retinal disparity, that depends on the use of two eyes

Ex: hold two pencils in front of your eyes, touch tips - then try with one eye closed- harder.

Binocular cues are used to judge the distance of nearby objects (less than 10m?) ASK

Two types of binocular cues:

both our eyes see slightly different angles of the world- convergence is a cue to nearby objects distance, enabled by the brain combining retinal images from distances less than 10m.

both our eyes see slightly different angles of the world- a binocular cues for perceiving depth- by comparing retinal images from the two eyes, the brain computes distance- the greater the dispairity (difference) between two images, the closer the object.

Ex: 2 index fingers in front of your eyes, tips half an inch apart- see diff by closing one eye.

- when you look beyond your fingers, you see a finger sausage, and as you put your fingers farther away from your face the sausage shrinks and retinal dispairity decreases

Ex: 3D movies, everything shifted a bit with lenses, mimics extreme disparity, left eye only see left, right eye only see right

(ASK- what does this have to do with color?)

For larger distances- after 10m for binocular cues there's not really a difference. It is a depth cue, such as interposition or linear perspective, available to either eye alone. The 5 types of monocular cues are:

because move light passes thought objects that are farther away, we percieve them as hazy, blurry or unclear. Nearby objects appear sharp and clear.

If we assure two objects are similar in size, most people percieve the one that casts the smaller retinal image as farther away.

moving toward or away from an object changes our perception of it's smoothness or texture- when a wall is viewed from a distance, it is smooth. Viewing the same wall closely reveals greater texture and detail.

Ex: Sand dunes

parallel lines appear to meet in the distance. The sharper the angle of convergence, the greater the percieved distance is.

if one object partially blocks our view of another, it is percieved as closer.

our brain computers motion by shrinking objects= retreating and enlargening objects=approaching

- In young children on adolescent adults, sometimes they are unable to correctly percieve in this way. It is a risk for children.

Adults notice when large and small objects move at the same speed, the bigger one seems to move slower and the smaller one faster.

a perceptual phenomenon related to motion, where when we move, stable objects may appear to move.

Ex (Image): In a bus, fixtation point on a house, things behind it move with us, things in front move backwards

an illusion of continuous movement (As in a motion picture) experienced when viewing a rapid series of slightly varying still images.

Ex: blinking- 0.1 second is 15 times a minute

Ex; slide show of 24 still images a second= illusion of movement

(We construct this motion in our head just as we do movement in blinking marquees and holiday lights)

an illusion of movement created when two or more adjacent lights blink on and off in quick succession

Ex: moving around arrow lights, stationary lights

the illusory movement of a still spot of light in a dark room (when staring at it)

perceiving objects using top-down processing as unchanging (having consistent color, brightness, shape, and size) even as illumination and retinal images change or viewing angle/distance change. (This is the hard part for AI- we can do it faster than a breath)

- James Gibson argued an ecological approach to perception, in which our perceptions depend on an object's context. Subcategories of Perceptual constancy are:

Note: even when we know identical and consistent, we can construct our perceptions and simultaneously accept alternative objective and subjective realities.

percieving familiar objects as having consistent color, even if changing illumination alters the wavelengths reflected by the object.

Ex: Color of tomato- it changes as we view it through a paper tube, in darkness, in the normal light, but we know the color stays essentially consistent.

ASK Ex (image) 2.1-17, 181: Blue poker chip, under indoor lighting, reflects wavelengths that match those reflected by a sunlit gold chip. yet bring a gold finch indoor and it will not look like a bluebird. The color is not in the bird's feathers. We see color thanks to our brain's computations of the light reflected by an object realitvie to the objects surrounding it

(also known as lightness constancy) similarly depends on context. We percieve an object as having a constant brightness even if it's surrounding illumination varies. (relative luminance)

the amount of light an object refleccts relative to it's surroundings.

Ex: white paper reflects 90% of the light falling on it; black paper, only 10%- in sunlight, 100x reflects more than a white paper viewed indoors, but still looks black (What is the difference between indoors and outdoors?)

Ex: sunlit black paper through a narrow tube moved slightly away from the paper but close enough so nothing else is visible- it looks gray, reflects a fair amount of light, but without the tube it is black- it reflects far less light than the objects around it.

Ex: Figure 2.1-18

(181, relative luminance on context, dark or light surround?)

we perceive the form of familiar objects, such as the door in in figure 2.1-19 as constant even while our retinas receive changing images of them. - Visual cortex neurons rapidly learn to associate different views of an object.

percieving an object as having an unchanging size, even when our distance from it varies (close connection to percieved distance and percieve size. Distance= clues at size, likewise general size= clues about distance

Ex: Moon illusion- moon looks up to 50% larger than when near the horizon than when high in the sky. But the horizon moon is actually smaller if you use a paper tube to take away the monocular distance cue on the horizon moon.

ASK: how do monocular cues trick us? How can they trick us?

organizes info according to what we know

we are inborn to ways of organizing sensory experiences, and we learn through our experiences how to percieve the world (Ex. object's distance w/size) How much does experience change us?

Tested: Healed cataracs patients, and were able to distinguish figure from ground, colors, faces/non faces, but not objects familiar by touch. The rest was innate.

Ex: Mike May lost vision at 3, when Healed visual cortex not experience enough to properly interpret signals and recognize faces other than hair.

-can see motion

-eyes not degenerated and retinas still relay signals

-brain's cortical cell, had not developed normal connections (blind to shape)

The sooner this issue is fixed, the better- there is a critical period of perceptual development in which exposure to certain stimuli is necessecary. If this critical period passes, sensory restrictions are not as permanent

the ability to adjust to changed sensory input, including an artifically displaced or even inverted visual field.

Ex: new pair of glasses, feel dizzy at first- if glasses 40 degrees left, then you do everying meant to be straight at 40 degrees left, but then adapt to it.

(Baby chickens do not adapt like this)

-when you remove lenses, 40 degrees right now, but readapt quickly.

Ex; George Stratton- optical headgear 8 days that flips everything.

...

yes, we adapt to changed sensory input (Especially critical periods in early nurture)

Ex: radiologists who spend careers inspecting complex visual patterns outperform novices in detecting unfamiliar visual info.

NOTE: experience guides,s upstairs, and maintain the brain pathways that enabled our perceptions.

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Thinking, Problem solving, Judgements, and Decision Making: Concept and creativity

All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering and communicating

Cognition about our cognition (type of cognition)- when we keep track of and evaluate our mental processes.

Ex: Thinking when planning and assessing our understanding and preformance (do better academically)

A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people. (A way of simplifying thinking- if no concept, cannot think about what a chair is, or what a ball is. It gives us info with little cognitive effort).

Ex: Chair - (high chairs, reclining chairs, dentist chairs)

Ex: "Throw the ball"

A mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories.

Ex: Crows are "birdier" compared to penguins.

When we see people we mentally shift them (race, gender, etc) further towards our category prototypes, despite it being not as close as we claim to the prototype.

Ex: Berlin students- see white people with 70% white features now 80%- associate with prototype, same with any stereotype (It guides our thinking, but it does not always make us wise)

The farther the new items are from the example, the category boundaries blur. It is then harder to percieve which catergory something is in, causing issues.

Ex: Tomato a fruit?

Ex: Heart attack symptoms- not striking pain in chest? Not it.

a concept or framework the maturing brain builds that organizes and interprets info. (Mental molds- pour experiences)

Ex: Changing marriage schema- marriage= man + woman only, now same sex recognized.

Ex: Biases that women scientists are not good, discount the important accomplishments of woman scientists

(Jean Piaget)

1) Assimilate- interpreting our new experiences int terms of our existing schemas

Ex: Have simple schema for a dog- toddler may call everything four-legged a dog

2) Accomodate- In developmental Psych- adapting our current schemas (understandings) to incorporate new info from our experiences

Ex: Child realizes that it is too broad, hears four-legged animal is actually a cat too, refines category.

the ability to producer new and valuable ideas.

Ex: Fermat's Last Theorem (Pierre de Femat)- Wiles pondered his theory, not able to understand it- but as his mind wandered he suddenly had a realization, understood it. (Creativity)

Creativity is supported by aptitude- ability to learn, which is quantitative. Makes you more likely to have work published and is more than IQ tests.

Converge- Combine to one

Narrowing the available problem solutions to determine a single best solution

Ex: SAT, STAR testing

Diverge- to separate, divide

expanding the number of possible problem solutions; creative thinking that diverges in different directions

Ex: How many ways can you use a brick?

Occurs when our prior experiences inhibit our ability to find creative solutions.

Ex: bricklayers may only see a brick as part of a home rather than as a possible doorstep

Believe creativity has 5 components.

Expertise- well-developed and broadened knowledge on a topic of interest- it furnishes the ideas, images and phrases we use as mental building blocks.

"Chance favors only the prepared mind"- Louis Pasteur

- The more blocks we have, the more chances we have to combine them in novel ways.

-The longer we work on a problem, the more creative our solutions.

Imaginative thinking skills- Provides the ability to see things in novel ways, to recognize patterns and to make connections. Having mastered a problem's basic elements we can redefine and explore it in a new way.

A venturesome personality- seeks new experiences, tolerates ambiguity and risk and perserveres in overcoming obstacles.

Intristic motivation- the quality of being driven more by the interest, satisfaction, and challenge of something than by external motivations- meeting deadlines, impressing people, or making money - than on the pleasure and stimulation of the work itself

A creative enviroment- sparks, supports and refines creative ideas. A study of careers of the 2026 prominent scientist and inventors revealed that the most eminent where matured, challenged, and supported by their colleagues. Fostering enviroments: supporting innovation, team building, contemplation and communciation, minimizing anxiety.

Expertise- Do what you most enjoy, follow passion, broaden knowledge

Time for incubation- think hard on a problem, set it aside and come back later- sleeping on it, inattention, helps process and form associations.

Let the mind roam- detach from attetion-grabbing stuff, get out, meditate, serenity

Experiences other cultures and ways of thinking

-view life from a differrent perspective, spend time in other cultures, blend new norms with those from home culture, ups creativity. Getting out of neighborhood, intercultural friendships, be flexible