Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

AIPS
Cognitive Psychology [PSYC612]

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Perception

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Perception

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Perception
• In cognitive psychology we refer to the physical (external) world as well as
the mental (internal) world. The interface between external reality and the
inner world is centered in the sensory system.

• Sensation refers to the initial detection of energy from the physical world.
The study of sensation generally deals with the structure and processes of
the sensory mechanism and the stimuli that affect those mechanisms.

• Perception, on the other hand, involves higher-order cognition in the

interpretation of the sensory information.

• Basically, sensation refers to the initial detection of stimuli; perception to an

interpretation of the things we sense.

• When we read a book, listen to our iPod, get a massage, smell cologne, or
taste sushi, we experience far more than the immediate sensory stimulation. 4
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Perception
• Sensory events are processed within the context of our knowledge of the
world, on culture, expectations, and even who we are with at the time.

• These give meaning to simple sensory experiences—that is perception.

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Perception
Perception

• n. the process or result of becoming aware of objects,

relationships, and events by means of the senses, which includes
such activities as recognizing, observing, and discriminating.

• These activities enable organisms to organize and interpret the

stimuli received into meaningful knowledge and to act in a
coordinated manner.
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PERCEPTION
Perception uses previous knowledge to gather and interpret the stimuli
registered by the senses.

• For example, consider how you managed to perceive the letter at the end of
the word perception.

You combined

• (1) information registered by your eyes,

• (2) your previous knowledge about the shape of the letters of the
alphabet, and

• (3) your previous knowledge about what to expect when your visual
system has already processed the fragment perceptio-.
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Perception

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Perception

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Top-down and Bottom-up processing

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Bottom-up processing
• Emphasizes that the stimulus characteristics are important when you
recognize an object.

• Specifically, the physical stimuli from the environment are registered on the
sensory receptors. This information is then passed on to higher, more
sophisticated levels in the perceptual system (Carlson, 2010; Gordon, 2004).

• For example, glance away from your textbook and focus on one specific object
that is nearby. Notice its shape, size, color, and other important physical
characteristics.

• When these characteristics are registered on your retina, the object-recognition

process begins. This information starts with the most basic (or bottom) level of
perception, and it works its way up until it reaches the more ‘‘sophisticated’’
cognitive regions of the brain, beyond your primary visual cortex. The
combination of simple, bottom-level features helps you recognize more complex,
whole objects. 11
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Bottom-up processing
• Emphasizes that the stimulus characteristics are important when you
recognize an object.

• Specifically, the physical stimuli from the environment are registered on the
sensory receptors. This information is then passed on to higher, more
sophisticated levels in the perceptual system (Carlson, 2010; Gordon, 2004).

• For example, glance away from your textbook and focus on one specific object
that is nearby. Notice its shape, size, color, and other important physical
characteristics.

• When these characteristics are registered on your retina, the object-recognition

process begins. This information starts with the most basic (or bottom) level of
perception, and it works its way up until it reaches the more ‘‘sophisticated’’
cognitive regions of the brain, beyond your primary visual cortex. The
combination of simple, bottom-level features helps you recognize more complex,
whole objects. 12
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Bottom-up processing
Featural analysis- model of perception

The parts searched for and recognized are called features. Recognition of a
whole object, in this model, thus depends on recognition of its features.

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Bottom-up processing

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Top-down processing
• Top-down processing emphasizes how a person’s concepts,
expectations, and memory can influence object recognition.

• In more detail, these higher-level mental processes all help in identifying

objects.

• You expect certain shapes to be found in certain locations, and you expect
to encounter these shapes because of your past experiences. These
expectations help you recognize objects very rapidly.

• In other words, your expectations at the higher (or top) level of visual
processing will work their way down and guide our early processing
of the visual stimulus (Carlson, 2010; Donderi, 2006; Gregory, 2004a).

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Top-down processing
• Think how your top-down processing helped you to quickly recognize the
specific nearby object that you selected a moment ago.

• Your top-down processing made use of your expectations and your memory
about objects that are typically nearby. This top-down process then
combined together with the specific physical information about the stimulus
from bottom-up processing.

• As a result, you could quickly and seamlessly identify the object (Carlson,
2010). As we noted earlier, object recognition requires both bottom-up and
top-down processing.

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Top-down processing

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Top-down processing

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Top-down processing

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Top-down processing
• Both accuracy and the length of time needed to recognize objects vary with
the context (Biederman, Glass, & Stacy, 1973; Palmer, 1975).

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Perception

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Perception

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Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization

gestalt principles of organization

principles of perception, derived by the Gestalt psychologists, that describe the tendency to perceive
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and interpret certain configurations at the level of the whole rather than in terms of their component
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Perceptual Learning

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Learning
• n. the acquisition of novel information, behaviors, or
abilities after practice, observation, or other experiences,
as evidenced by change in behavior, knowledge, or brain
function.

• Learning involves consciously or unconsciously

attending to relevant aspects of incoming information,
mentally organizing the information into a coherent
cognitive representation, and integrating it with relevant
existing knowledge activated from long-term memory.

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Perceptual Learning
“an increase in the ability to extract
information from the environment as a result
of experience or practice with the stimulation
coming from it (Gibson, 1969)”

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Perceptual Learning
• Perceptual learning is defined as a rather permanent and
specific change in the perception of and reaction to
external stimuli based on preceding training or
experience with these stimuli.

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Perceptual Learning
• Perceptual learning leads to relatively permanent and often very
specific improvements in solving perceptual tasks as a result of
preceding experience and training.

• E.g. Ornithologists, Blind people

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Perceptual Learning
Implicit learning

• learning of a cognitive or behavioral task that occurs without intention to

learn or awareness of what has been learned.

• Implicit learning is evidenced by improved task performance rather than as

a response to an explicit request to remember.

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Perceptual Learning

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Perceptual Learning
Learning to perceive the relationships
between stimuli and objects in the
environment or the differences among
stimuli.

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Perceptual Learning
• Perceptual learning is experience-dependent enhancement of
our ability to make sense of what we see, hear, feel, taste or smell.

• These changes are permanent or semi-permanent, as distinct

from shorter-term mechanisms like sensory adaptation or
habituation.

• Moreover, these changes are not merely incidental but rather

adaptive and therefore confer benefits, like improved sensitivity to
weak or ambiguous stimuli.

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Perceptual Learning

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Perceptual Learning
• Three aspects of perceptual learning make it of general interest.

• First, perceptual learning reflects an inherent property of our perceptual

systems and thus must be studied to understand perception.

• Second, perceptual learning is robust even in adults and thus

represents an important substrate for studying mechanisms of learning and
memory that persist beyond development.

• Third, perceptual learning is readily studied in a laboratory using simple

perceptual tasks and thus researchers can exploit well-established
psychophysical, physiological and computational methods to investigate the
underlying mechanisms.

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Perceptual Learning
• Perceptual learning may be regarded as a new subtype of implicit
learning and seems to involve a number of different levels of the
cortical hierarchy, from higher, cognitive levels down to primary
sensory areas, with strong involvement of attention and other top-
down influences.

• The involvement of the low levels of cortical information processing

sets perceptual learning apart from most other forms of nonmotor
learning and has revolutionized our views regarding the plasticity of
these early levels in adult humans.

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Perceptual Learning
• Perceptual learning is a specific case, characterized by being
restricted to sensory information and by proceeding usually without
subjective insight into what exactly is changing during the process,
as is typical for implicit forms of learning.

• This distinguishes perceptual learning from insightful, cognition-

based changes in the understanding of facts or relations and from
explicit forms of learning.

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Perceptual Learning
• ‘Plasticity’ stands for changes on both the functional and the
anatomic level of the central nervous system which lead to a better
adjustment to the outer world or to compensation of defects.

• The term ‘adaptation’ denotes a short-term adjustment of the

working range of a sensory system, often without any long-term
consequences, which is its main difference from perceptual
learning.

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Expert Perceptual Skills

• In everyday life, training will improve performance in a multitude of
perceptual skills, ranging from visual over acoustical to gustatory (taste)
and olfactory (smell) abilities.

• Expert perceptual skills reach astonishing levels and give testimony of what
subtlety of discrimination can be obtained through training,

• complex visual objects (such as CT-scans of normal versus pathological

brains),

• attributing a few bars of music to the corresponding composer,

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Expert Perceptual Skills

• In vernier discrimination, where subjects have to discriminate
between offsets to the right versus offsets to the left in lines with tiny
breaks, even thresholds of untrained observers are usually around
20 arcsec, that is below the diameter and spacing of foveal
photoreceptors (i.e. the light receiving elements at the center of the
retina).

• Trained observers may achieve thresholds down to about 2 arcsec,

hence vernier discrimination is quite finely tuned but nevertheless
open to considerable improvement through training.

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Expert Perceptual Skills

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Specificity of Learning

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Specificity of Learning

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Specificity of Learning
• It has been known since 1980 that improvement in many of these tasks is
rather specific for basic stimulus attributes such as stimulus orientation or
position in the visual field.

• Fiorentini and Beradi, in 1980, found that the improvement through training
in discriminating on a vernier discrimination task, and even a two-dot
stereoscopic depth discrimination task improved for horizontally separated
dots through training with these stimuli, only to return to baseline
performance when the dots were separated vertically rather than
horizontally.

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Specificity of Learning
• Observers improved for both of these tasks, but there was no transfer of
improvement, indicating that perceptual learning is not (mainly) based on
motor learning, since any form of better fixation or accommodation should
have transferred between these tasks.

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Role of Attention
• Several independent investigations found that mere presentation of a
stimulus that is not attended to improves long-term performance only
marginally, or not at all.

• Hence, there must be strong top-down influences from more ‘upstream’

parts of the cortical hierarchy that select which features of the stimulus are
attended to, and only those features seem to be effectively learned.

• Another indication for top-down influences is the fact that after a few clearly
above-threshold presentations of the critical feature (hence after stimuli that
are easily categorized), observers seem to gain some form of knowledge
about which features of the stimulus to attend to and considerably improve
performance within a short time.

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Role of Attention
• Stimuli usually contain several features, and the number of features
increases with the complexity of the stimulus displayed. How does the visual
system know which features to attend to? As we just saw, top-down
influences such as ‘attention’ probably play a major role here.

• Another top-down influence is error feedback. While perceptual learning is

certainly possible even without error feedback, it seems to be faster when
error feedback is provided

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Perceptual Development

OBJECTIVES:

What senses do newborn babies have?

Do their senses work like adults?
How do Infants perceive the world?
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Perceptual Development
• the acquisition of skills that enable a person to organize
sensory stimuli into meaningful entities during the course
of physical and psychological development.

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Perceptual Development
• The most active investigations about perceptual development focus on
infants’ visual and auditory capabilities. Researchers who study these topics
have demonstrated impressive creativity and persistence in designing
research techniques for assessing early abilities.

• Two representative methods are the following:

• (1) the habituation/dishabituation method, in which infants decrease their

attention to an object that has been presented many times, and then
increase their attention when a new object is presented; and

• (2) the preference method, in which infants spend consistently longer

responding to one object than to a second object.

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Perceptual Development

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Perceptual Development

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The Senses begin to function early in

life. But how can we actually know
what an infant senses?

Since infants can’t tell us, researchers have devised ways

to find out.
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Sensation
• To understand what an infant can sense
researchers often present two stimuli and record
the baby’s response.

– For example a baby is given a sweet tasting

substance and a sour tasting substance

• If the baby consistently responds differently to

the two stimuli then the infant must be able to
distinguish between them.
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A technique called Habituation is

often used in researching infant
preference
This is the process of getting used to
something.
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Can infants use their senses

like adults?

NO, we do not arrive with all of our

senses fully functioning. This is yet
another area that will develop and mature
with the infant.
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Smell
• Infants have a keen sense of smell and
respond positively to pleasant smells and
negatively to unpleasant smells (Menella,
1997).

– Honey, vanilla, strawberry, or chocolate:

relaxed, produces a contented-looking facial
expression

– Rotten eggs, fish, or ammonia produce exactly

what you might expect…infants frown,
grimace or turn away
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Taste

• Newborns also have a highly developed

sense of taste. They can differentiate
salty, sour, bitter & sweet tastes
(Rosenstein, 1997).

• Do you think infant’s have a favorite

taste?
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Taste
• Most infants seem to have a “sweet tooth”.
– Infants will nurse more after their mother has
consumed a sweet-tasting substance like
vanilla (Menalla, 1997)

• Newborns prefer sweet. However, at 4

months, infants will have a salty preference

– They will start liking salt which was aversive to

them as newborns.
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Touch

• Newborns are sensitive to touch, many

areas of the newborn’s body respond
reflexively when touched

• What do YOU think?

– If babies react to touch, do they experience
pain?
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OUCH!?
• The infant’s nervous system
is definitely capable of
experiencing pain

• Receptors for pain in the skin

are just as plentiful in infants
as they are in adults.

• Babies behavior in response

to a pain-provoking stimulus
suggests that they
experience pain.
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What Do Infants See?

• Vision is the least mature of all the

senses at birth because the fetus has
nothing to look at, so visual
connections in the brain can’t form
until birth.
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• Newborn visual acuity is 20/400 to 20/800

• 20/200 or worse defines legal blindness in
adults

• By 6 months, infant visual acuity is 20/25

• By 1 year, infant visual acuity is at adult levels

(20/20)
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What is the clarity of infant vision and

how can we measure it?
• Visual acuity is defined as the smallest pattern
that can distinguished dependably.

– Infants prefer to look at patterned stimuli instead of

plain, non-patterned stimuli

• To estimate an infant’s visual acuity, we pair

gray squares with squares that differ in the
width of their stripes.
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When the infant looks at the two stimuli equally long, it indicates they
are no longer able to distinguish the stripes of the patterned stimulus
from the solid gray square
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At birth, infants’ sensitivity to fine, high-

spatial frequency gratings, like their acuity,
is very poor but improves steadily with age.
 Light Sensitivity
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• Newborns begin to see the world not only with greater

acuity but also in color

• At birth, infants have the greatest sensitivity to

intermediate wavelengths (yellow/green) and less to
short (blue/violet) or long (red/orange).
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• Newborns can perceive few colors, but By

3-4 months newborns are able to see the
full range of colors (Kellman, 1998).

– In fact, by 3-4 months infants have color

perception similar to adults (Adams, 1995).
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• At 1 week, the infant

can discriminate the
desaturated red from
gray

• At 2 months, the infant

can discriminate the
desaturated blue from
gray
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What do babies hear?

• Hearing is the most mature sense at birth. In fact, some
sounds trigger reflexes even without conscious
perception.

– The fetus most likely heard these sounds in the womb during last
trimester

• Sudden sounds startle babies-making them cry, some

rhythmic sounds, like a heartbeat/lullaby put a baby to
sleep.

• Yes, infants in first days of life, turn their head toward

source of sounds and they can distinguish voices,
language, and rhythm.
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Auditory Threshold
• The fetus can hear in utero at 7-8 months, so it
is no surprise that newborns respond to auditory
stimuli but, do infants hear as well as adults??

• No they cannot. The Auditory threshold refers to

the quietest sound that a person can hear.

• The quietest sound an newborn responds to is

about 4 times louder than the quietest sound an
adult responds to.
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Do infants hear like adults?

• Research reveals that adults hear better than infants
because adults can hear some very quiet sounds that
infants cannot.

• Research shows that infants hear sounds best that have

high pitches in the range of human speech (Jusczyk,
1995).

– Can differentiate vowels from consonants

– At 4 months, can recognize own name

• Infants also use sound to locate objects and estimate

distance.
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How DO Infants
Perceive the World?
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Perceptual Constancies

• An important part of perceiving objects is that

the same object can look very different

• Infants master size constancy very early on

– They recognize that an object remains the

same size despite its distance from the
observer
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You can recognize that the woman in this picture

has not shrunk…she is just farther away
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Depth Perception
• Infants are not born with depth perception, it must
develop. The images on the back of our eyes are flat and
2-dimensional

• To create a 3-D view of the world, the brain combines

information from the separate images of the two eyes,
retinal disparity

• Visual experience along with development in the brain

lead to the emergence of binocular depth perception
around 3-5 months of age
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Perception in infants
• Can infants process sensory
information accurately?

• This was a question posed by

Walk and Gibson in 1960

• The Visual cliff experiment was

designed to provide the illusion
of a sudden drop off between
one horizontal surface and
another
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Face Recognition
• Infants enjoy looking at faces, a preference that
may reflect innate attraction to faces, or a fact
that faces may attract infant’s attention.

• At birth, infants are attracted to the borders of

objects When looking at a human face
– a newborn will pay more attention to the hairline or
the edge of the face (even though the newborn can
see the features of the face)
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• By 2 months of age, infants begin to attend to the

internal features of the face – such as the nose and
mouth

• By 3 months of age, infants focus almost entirely on

the interior of the face, particularly on the eyes and
lips. At this age, infants can tell the difference
between mother’s face and a stranger’s face.

• Theorist’s believe that infants are attracted to human

faces because faces have stimuli that move (eyes
and lips) and stimuli with dark and light contrast (the
eyes, lips and teeth).
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Infants readily look at faces, a

preference that may reflect an innate
attraction to faces or the fact that
faces have many properties that
attract infant’s attention
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Perceiving Faces
• Infants are particularly interested in looking at human
faces, but focus on different areas of the face depending
on their age
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Motor Development
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Test your Knowledge
At what age can at least 50% of children
begin to display each of these behaviors?

• Pedal a tricycle • Roll over

• Sit without support • Kick a ball forward

• Walk unassisted • Crawl

• Stand on one foot

for 10 seconds
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How Did You Do?

• Pedal a tricycle • Roll over
• 2 years, 90% by 3years
•
• 3 months, 90% by 5
Sit without support
• 6 Months, 90% by 7-8 months. months.
• Walk unassisted • Kick a ball forward
• 12 Months, 90% by 14 months. • 20 months, 90% by 9
• Stand on one foot for 10
seconds
months.
• 4 ½ years • Crawl
• 7 months, 90% by 9
months
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Motor Milestones
50 percent 90 percent
Roll over 3.2 months 5.4 months
Grasp rattle 3.3 months 3.9 months
Sit without support 5.9 months 6.8 months
Stand holding on 7.2 months 8.5 months
Pincer grasp 8.2 months 10.2 months
Crawl 7.0 months 9.0 months
Stand alone 11.5 months 13.7 months
Walks well 12.3 months 14.9 months
Build tower (2 14.8 months 20.6 months
cubes)
Walk steps 16.6 months 21.6 months
Jump in place 23.8 months 2.4 years
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Handedness
• Young babies reach for objects without a preference for
one hand over the other

• The preference for one hand over the other becomes

stronger and more consistent during preschool years

– By the time children are ready to enter kindergarten, handedness

is well established and very difficult to reverse

• Handedness is determined by heredity and

environmental factors
– Approximately 10% of children write left-handed
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Head Control
• At birth infants can turn their heads from
side to side while lying on their backs

• By 2-3 months they can lift their heads

while lying on their stomachs

• By 4 months infants can keep heads

erect while being held or supported in a
sitting position
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Before you walk, you must learn to….

• At around 6-8 months, infants become capable

of self-locomotion

• To master walking (around 13-14 months),

infants must acquire distinct skills

– Standing upright
– Maintaining balance
– Stepping alternately
– Using perceptual information to evaluate surfaces
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Crawling
• Begins as belly-crawling
– The “inchworm belly-flop” style

• Most belly crawlers then shift to hands-and-knees, or in

some cases, hands-and-feet

• Some infants will adopt a different style of locomotion in

place of crawling such as bottom-shuffling while some
infants skip crawling altogether

• Due to the “back-to-sleep” movement, infants spend less

time on their tummies which may limit their opportunity to
learn how to propel themselves
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Belly-
crawling

Hands-and-knees
crawling

Hands-and-feet
crawling
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Walking – Stepping
• Children do not step spontaneously until
approximately 10 months because they must be
able to stand in order to step

• Maintaining balance when transferring weight

from foot to foot seems to be key

• Thelen and Ulrich (1991) found that 6- and 7-

month-olds, if held upright by an adult, could
demonstrate the mature pattern of walking of
alternating steps on a treadmill
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Gross motor skills

• Emerge directly from reflexes.

• These are physical abilities involving large

body movements and large muscle groups
such as walking and jumping.

• Involve the movement of the entire body-

– Rolling over, standing, walking climbing, running
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Fine Motor Skills

• After infancy fine motor skills progress rapidly
and older children become more dexterous
because these movements involve the use of
small muscle groups

• These consist of small body movements,

especially of the hands and fingers.

– such as drawing, writing your name, picking up a

coin, buttoning or zipping a coat.
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Perception of Shape, Space

and Movement

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Perception of Shape, Space and

Movement
• Do we perceive objects in a viewer-centered or in an object-centered
way?

• When we gaze at any object in the space around us, do we perceive it in

relation to us rather than its actual structure, or do we perceive it in a more
objective way that is independent of how it appears to us right this moment?
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Perception of Shape, Space and

Movement

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Perception of Shape, Space and

Movement
Viewer-centered representation, is that the individual stores the way the object looks to
him or her.

Thus, what matters is the appearance of the object to the viewer (in this case, the
appearance of the computer to the author), not the actual structure of the object.

The shape of the object changes, depending on the angle from which we look at it.

A number of views of the object are stored, and when we try to recognize an object, we
have to rotate that object in our mind until it fits one of the stored images.
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Perception of Shape, Space and

Movement
Consider, for example, the computer on which this text is being written. It has
different parts: a screen, a keyboard, a mouse, and so forth.

Suppose the author represents the computer in terms of viewer-centered

representation. Then its various parts are stored in terms of their relation to him. He
sees the screen as facing him at perhaps a 20-degree angle. He sees the keyboard
facing him horizontally. He sees the mouse off to the right side and in front of him.

Suppose, instead, that he uses an object-centered representation. Then he would see

the screen at a 70-degree angle relative to the keyboard. And the mouse is directly to the
right side of the keyboard, neither in front of it nor in back of it.

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Visual Object Recognition

Object-centered representation, is that the individual stores a representation of the
object, independent of its appearance to the viewer.

In this case, the shape of the object will stay stable across different orientations

Landmark-centered representation. In landmark-centered representation, information

is characterized by its relation to a well-known or prominent item.

Imagine visiting a new city. Each day you leave your hotel and go on short trips. It
is easy to imagine that you would represent the area you explore in relation to your hotel.

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Feature Analysis Theory

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Feature Analysis Theory

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The Recognition-by-Components

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Perception of Groups—Gestalt Laws

The Gestalt approach to form perception that was developed in Germany in the early
20th century is useful particularly for understanding how we perceive groups of objects or
even parts of objects to form integral wholes (Palmer, 1999a, 1999b, 2000; Palmer &
Rock, 1994; Prinzmetal, 1995).

It was founded by Kurt Koffka (1886–1941), Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1968), and Max
Wertheimer (1880–1943) and was based on the notion that the whole differs from the
sum of its individual parts

Prägnanz

n. one of the Gestalt principles of organization. It states that people tend to perceive
forms as the simplest and most meaningful, stable, and complete structures that
conditions permit.

For example, we tend to perceive a focal figure and other sensations as forming a
background for the figure on which we focus.
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Perception of Groups—Gestalt Laws

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Figure Ground Effect

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Figure Ground Effect

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Perception of Depth,
Distance, and Movement

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Perception of Depth and Distance

Depth cue

• any of a variety of means used to inform the visual system about the depth
of a target or its distance from the observer.

• Monocular cues require only one eye and include signals about the state of
the ciliary muscles, atmospheric perspective, linear perspective, and
occlusion of distant objects by near objects.

• Binocular cues require integration of information from the two eyes and
include signals about the convergence of the eyes and binocular disparity.
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Perception of Depth and Distance

Monocular Depth Cues

• One such cue is patterns of light and shadow.

• linear perspective, refers to the perception that parallel lines converge, or angle
toward one another, as they recede into the distance.

• Interposition, in which objects closer to us may cut off part of our view of more
distant objects, provides another cue for distance and depth.

• An object’s height in the horizontal plane provides another source of information.

• Likewise, clarity can be an important cue for judging distance; we can see nearby
hills more clearly than ones that are far away, especially on hazy days.

• Relative size is yet another basis for distance judgments. If we see two objects that
we know to be of similar size, then the one that looks smaller will be judged to be
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Perception of Depth and Distance

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Perception of Depth and Distance

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Perception of Depth and Distance

Binocular Depth Cues

Binocular cues require integration of information from the two eyes and include signals
about the convergence of the eyes and binocular disparity.

Convergence

n. the rotation of the two eyes inward toward a light source so that the image falls on
corresponding points on the foveas.

Convergence enables the slightly different images of an object seen by each eye to come
together and form a single image. The muscular tension exerted is also a cue to the
distance of the object from the eyes.

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Binocular Disparity

the slight difference between the right and left retinal images. When both eyes focus on
an object, the different position of the eyes produces a disparity of visual angle, and a
slightly different image is received by each retina. The two images are automatically
compared and, if sufficiently similar, are fused, providing an important cue to depth
perception. Also called retinal disparity.

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Perception of Movement
• The perception of movement is a complex process, sometimes requiring the
brain to integrate information from several different senses.

Example:

• Hold a pen in front of your face. Now, while holding your head still, move the
pen back and forth. You will perceive the pen as moving. Now hold the pen
still and move your head back and forth at the same rate of speed. In both
cases, the image of the pen moved across your retina in about the same
way. But when you moved your head, your brain took into account input
from your kinesthetic and vestibular systems and concluded that you were
moving but the pen was not.

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Perception of Movement
• The primary cue for perceiving motion is the movement of the stimulus
across the retina (Sekuler et al., 2002).

• Under optimal conditions, a retinal image need move only about one fifth the
diameter of a single cone for us to detect movement (Nakayama & Tyler,
1981).

• The relative movement of an object against a structured background is

also a movement cue (Gibson, 1979).

Example: if you fixate on a bird in flight, the relative motion of the bird against
its background is a strong cue for perceived speed of movement.

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Perception of Movement
Illusion of motion

• Illusion of smooth motion can be produced if we arrange for the sequential

appearance of two or more stimuli.

• Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer (1912) demonstrated this in his

studies of stroboscopic movement, illusory movement produced when
light is briefly flashed in darkness and then, a few milliseconds later, another
light is flashed nearby.

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Perception of Movement
• Stroboscopic movement (termed the “phi phenomenon” by Wertheimer)
has been used commercially in numerous ways.

• For example, think of the strings of successively illuminated lights on theater

marquees that seem to move endlessly around the border or that spell out
messages in a moving script.

• Stroboscopic movement is also the principle behind motion pictures, which

consist of a series of still photographs, or frames, that are projected on a
screen in rapid succession with dark intervals in between

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Perception of Movement

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Perception of Movement
• In the phi phenomenon, the perception of motion is based on the
momentary hiding of an image.

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Perception of Movement
• In the beta effect, our eyes detect motion from a series of still images, each with the
object in a different place. This is the fundamental mechanism of motion pictures
(movies).

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Perception of Depth and Distance

• [Link]

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Sensory Integration Theory

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Sensory Integration Theory

• [Link]

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Sensory Integration Theory

• Sensory Integration is a theory developed by A. Jean Ayres, an occupational
therapist with advanced training in neuroscience and educational
psychology (Bundy & Murray, 2002).

• Ayres (1972) defines sensory integration as "the neurological process that

organizes sensation from one's own body and from the environment and
makes it possible to use the body effectively within the environment" (p. 11).

• The theory is used to explain the relationship between the brain and
behavior and explains why individuals respond in a certain way to sensory
input and how it affects behavior.

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Sensory Integration Theory

The five main senses are:

• Touch - tactile
• Sound - auditory
• Sight - visual
• Taste - gustatory
• Smell – olfactory

In addition, there are two other powerful senses:

• a) vestibular (movement and balance sense)-provides information about

where the head and body are in space and in relation to the earth's surface.

• b) proprioception (joint/muscle sense)-provides information about where

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Sensory Integration Theory

How efficiently we process sensory information affects our ability to:

• a) discriminate sensory information to obtain precise information from the

body and the environment in order to physically interact with people and
objects.

• An accurate body scheme is necessary for motor planning, i.e., being able
to plan unfamiliar movements.

• It involves having the idea of what to do, sequencing the required

movements, and executing the movements in a well-timed, coordinated
manner.

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Sensory Integration Theory

b) modulate sensory information to adjust to the circumstances and maintain
optimum arousal for the task at hand.

• Sensory modulation is the "capacity to regulate and organize the degree,

intensity and nature of responses to sensory input in a graded and adaptive
manner" (Miller & Lane, 2000).

• Sensory defensiveness, a type of sensory modulation problem, is defined by

Wilbarger and Wilbarger (1991) as "a constellation of symptoms related to
aversive or defensive reactions to non-noxious stimuli across one or more
sensory systems" (Wilbarger & Wilbarger, 2002a, p. 335)

• It can affect changes in the state of alertness, emotional tone, and stress
(Wilbarger & Wilbarger, 2002a).

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Sensory Integration Theory

• Dr Ayres was an occupational therapist working with children with
learning disabilities in California.

• Noticing that many of these children interpreted sensory messages

differently to their peers, she began to focus her attention on the
touch, vestibular, proprioceptive and vision senses.

• Her research indicated that the children she was working with did
not integrate, or combine, the messages from these senses very
well. This is how she started to develop her sensory integration
theory.

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Sensory Integration Theory

As a result of poor integration of the sensory messages, Dr. Ayres theorized
children could have challenges with:

• Postural control

• Coordination of both sides of the body (bilateral integration)

• Sensory sensitivity

• Discrimination and/or

• Dyspraxia.

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Sensory Integration (SI) & Learning

Dr. Ayres felt that these SI challenges were contributing to the children’s
difficulties with learning.

The sensory integration model shows the senses Dr Ayres felt were most likely
to contribute to SI dysfunction.

Dr. Ayres hypothesized that each skill formed the foundation for the next skill.

Finally, resulting in the end products of concentration, attention, learning, etc.

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Sensory Integration (SI) & Learning

Through her work, Dr. Ayres created sensory integration therapy. She found
that if she treated the children using a SI approach they made improvements in
their learning.

The is called a ‘bottom up’ approach because it works on improving foundation

abilities with the expectation that this will have a knock on effect to function
skills.

So, for example, Dr. Ayres felt that working on postural control and
discrimination would improve a child’s handwriting without working specifically
on handwriting.

Many therapists still use this treatment approach today.

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Implicit Perception

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Implicit Perception

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Implicit Perception
Just as there are palpable effects on experience, thought, and action of
past events that cannot be consciously remembered, there also appear to be
similar effects of events in the current stimulus environment, which cannot be
consciously perceived.

Explicit perception may be identified with the subject’s conscious perception

of some object in the current environment, or the environment of the very
recent past, as reflected in his or her ability to report the presence, location,
form, identity, and/or activity of that object.

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Implicit Perception
By the same token, implicit perception entails any change in the person’s
experience, thought, or action which is attributable to such an event, in the
absence of (or independent of) conscious perception of that event.

Implicit perception is exemplified by what has been called ‘subliminal’

perception, involving stimuli that are in some sense too weak to cross the
threshold (limen) of conscious perception.

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Implicit Perception
In the earliest demonstrations of subliminal perception, the stimuli in question
were of very low intensity – ‘subliminal’ in the very strict sense of the term.

Later, stimuli of higher, supraliminal levels of intensity were rendered

‘subliminal’ by virtue of extremely brief presentations, or by the addition of a
‘masking’ stimulus which for all practical purposes rendered the stimuli invisible.

Subliminal perception quickly entered everyday vocabulary, as in the

controversy over subliminal advertising and the marketing of subliminal self-
help tapes.
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Implicit Perception
A subliminal message is a signal or message designed to pass below (sub) the
normal limits of perception.

For example it might be inaudible to the conscious mind (but audible to the
unconscious or deeper mind) or might be an image transmitted briefly and
unperceived consciously and yet perceived unconsciously. This definition
assumes a division between conscious and unconscious which may be
misleading; it may be more true to suggest that the subliminal message (sound
or image) is perceived by deeper parts of what is a single integrated mind.
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Implicit Perception
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Implicit Perception
The term subliminal message was popularized in a 1957 book entitled The
Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard. This book detailed a study of movie
theaters that supposedly used subliminal commands to increase the sales of
popcorn and Coca-Cola at their concession stands.

However, the study was fabricated, as the author of the study James
Vicary later admitted.
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Implicit Perception
In 1973 the book Subliminal Seduction claimed that subliminal techiques were
in wide use in advertising. The book contributed to a general climate of fear
with regard to Orwellian dangers (of subliminal messaging). Public concern was
enough to lead the Federal Communications Commission to hold hearings and
to declare subliminal advertising "contrary to the public interest" because it
involved "intentional deception" of the public.
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Implicit Perception
Subliminal perception or cognition is a subset of unconscious cognition where
the forms of unconscious cognition also include attending to one signal in a
noisy environment while unconsciously keeping track of other signals (e.g one
voice out of many in a crowded room) and tasks done automatically (e.g.
driving a car).
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Implicit Perception
In all such cases there has been research into how much of the unattended or
unconscious signal or message is perceived (unconsciously), i.e is the whole
message sensed and fully digested or perhaps only its main and simpler
features?

There are at least two schools of thought about this.

One of them argues that only the simpler features of unconscious signals are
perceived; however please note that the majority of the research done has
tended to test only for simpler features of cognition (rather than testing for
complete comprehension).

The second school of thought argues that the unconscious cognition is

comprehensive and that much more is perceived than can be verbalized.
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Implicit Perception
Various types of studies of subliminal perception have been conducted. For
example, of whether anaesthetized patients are completely unaware whilst
apparently completely asleep/unconscious.

Although the patients themselves report no knowledge of events whilst they are
anaesthetized, more indirect methods of examining what they can recall
confirm that information is perceived without any conscious awareness.
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Implicit Perception
Similarly, studies of patients with neurological damage show that patients who
claim e.g. not to be able to see certain stimuli nevertheless respond on the
basis of information received from those stimuli.

For example, in the case of the syndrome known as blindsight patients can be
unaware of receiving information within an area of their visual field that they
believe to be damaged.
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Implicit Perception
The adjective ‘implicit’ is preferable to ‘subliminal,’ because there are many
cases of unconscious perception in which the stimulus is not subliminal in the
technical sense of the term. The most dramatic example is that of ‘blindsight’ in
patients with lesions in striate cortex.

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Implicit Perception
Subliminal messages might gain their potential influence/power from the fact
that they may be able to cirumvent the critical functions of the conscious mind,
and it has often been argued that subliminal suggestions are therefore
potentially more powerful than ordinary suggestions.

This route to influence or persuasion would be akin to auto-suggestion or

hypnosis wherein the subject is encouraged to be (or somehow induced to be)
relaxed so that suggestions are directed to deeper (more gullible) parts of the
mind; some observers have argued that the unconscious mind is incapable of
critical refusal of hypnotic or subliminal suggestions.

Research findings do not support the conclusion that subliminal suggestions

are peculiarly powerful.
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Implicit Perception
Subliminal Messages in Advertising

A form of subliminal messaging commonly believed to exist involves the

insertion of "hidden" messages into movies and TV programs. The concept of
"moving pictures" relies on persistence of vision to create the illusion of
movement in a series of images projected at 23 to 30 frames per second; the
popular theory of subliminal messages usually suggests that subliminal
commands can be inserted into this sequence at the rate of perhaps 1 frame in
25 (or roughly 1 frame per second).

The hidden command in a single frame will flash across the screen so quickly
that it is not consciously perceived, but the command will supposedly appeal to
the subconscious mind of the viewer, and thus have some measurable effect in
terms of behavior.
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Implicit Perception
As to the question of whether subliminal messages are widely used to influence
groups of people e.g. audiences, there is no evidence to suggest that any
serious or sustained attempt has been made to use the technology on a
mass audience.

The widely-reported reports that arose in 1957 to the effect that customers in a
movie theatre in New Jersey had been induced by subliminal messages to
consume more popcorn and more Coca-Cola were almost certainly false.

The current consensus among marketing professionals is that subliminal

advertising is counter-productive. To some this is because they believe it to be
ineffective, but to most it is because they realise it would be a public relations
disaster if its use was discovered. Many have misgivings about using it in
marketing campaigns due to ethical considerations.
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Implicit Perception
During the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, a television ad campaigning for
Republican candidate George W. Bush showed words (and parts thereof)
scaling from the foreground to the background on a television screen. When the
word BUREAUCRATS flashed on the screen, one frame showed only the last
part, RATS. Democrats promptly asked the FCC to look into the matter, but no
penalties were ever assessed in the case.
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Implicit Perception
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Implicit Perception

Almost from the beginning of this line of research, a variety of methodological

critiques sought to undercut claims for subliminal perception.

However, beginning with the now-classic studies of Marcel, followed by the

work Merikle, Greenwald, and their associates, an increasing body of literature
has demonstrated subliminal perception, broadly defined, in a manner that
convincingly addresses these criticisms.

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Implicit Perception
With subliminal and other forms of implicit perception now demonstrated to the
methodological satisfaction of (almost) everyone, most of the remaining
controversy concerns the extent of its influence.

Dramatic claims for the power of subliminal influence, popularized by Vance

Packard’s expose ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ and revived in the American
presidential election of 2000 by a Republican television advertisement that
appeared to present the word ‘rats’ subliminally when discussing the
Democrats, appear to be grossly exaggerated.

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[Link]

[Link]

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