Perception
Percepts
Experience resulting from stimulation of the senses
Umwelt
The subjective world of an organism
Their experience will be different bc they perceive the world differently
Umwelt=/= reality
Psychophysics
Definition: the science determining quantitative relationships between
physical stimulation (e.g. sound pressure) and psychological/
perceptual experience (e.g. loudness)
Threshold theory
Perception either occurs or doesn’t occur, depending on stimulus
intensity
Absolute threshold: minimum amount of stimulus energy needed for a
stimulus to be perceived
If you manipulate the amount o stimulus energy, you should be able to
identify these absolute thresholds
Typical data- threshold stimulus level is 0.50 around 3-4 stimulus intensity
Precise measurements of what is actually out there in the real world
(Backyard kid?)- our perceptions are influenced by more than physical
stimulation.
A small person in front of me could produce the same image as a regular
person very far away.
Perceptual stability is maintained, despite drastic changes in the stimulation
1. Stimulation on receptors is ambiguous
2. Objects can be hidden or blurred
3. Objects look different from different viewpoints.
Stimulus on receptors is ambiguous
Inverse projection problem= task of determining the object responsible
for a particular image on the retina
o There are all sorts of actual objects that can make up that image.
e
o Loud noise and far way——
o Or soft noise and close——
Objects can be hidden or blurred
People can often identify objets that are obscured and therefore
incomplete.
Occurs in audition as well
o Often we can understand what we’re hearing even if blurred or
noisy or the phony wasn’t there.
Phoneme restoration effect: when a listener hears a phoneme (speech
sound) that is not atually present.
Occurs in audition as well.
Sine wave speech: a listener can still recognize words from synthetic
spech made up of amplitude of
Objects looks different from different viewpoints
Viewpoint invariance.
o Ex. (Goff picture) hat at different angles on different people at
different viewpoints but we can still recognize that it’s a hat on a
head.
The gestalt principles of perceptual organization
… moving away from considering just the physical stimulus features
1. Principle of good continuation
2. Principle of pragnanz/ good fatique/ simplicity
3. Principe of similarity
4. Principe of Proximity
5. Principe of Common fate
6. Principe of Familiarity
7. Principe of Symmetry
1.Principle of good continuation
Connected points that result in straight or smoothly curving lines are
seen as belonging together.
Lines tend to be seen as thought they follow the smoothest path.
Good continuation helps us perceive the rope as a single strand
2. Principle of pragnanz/ good figure/ simplicity.
Every stimulus pattern is seen so the resulting structure is as simple as
possible.
The simple explanation is the one that we experienced.
o Olympic rings are seen as 5 different rings and not different
shape of weird unfinished circle together
3 Principle of similarity
Similar things appear grouped together.
4 Principle of proximity
Things near each other appear grouped together.
o If you take apart the addidas logo, it doesn’t look like the logo
anymore
o Ex. Blurred people in the back are grouped together and people
in the front (unblurred) are grouped together.
5 Principle of common fate
Things moving in the same direction appear to be grouped together.
o Ex. Specs of dirt in the golfing picture.
6. Principle of familiarity
things are more likely to form groups that appear familiar or
meaningful.
We tend to make out things to make it meaningful
7 Principle of symmetry
The mind perceived objects as being symmetrical and forming around
a center point
Is it perceptually pleasing to divide objects into an even number of
symmetrical parts.
Black and white picture with the dog is principle of familiarity.
Perceptual stability
Even with drastic changes in stimulation, in which the same
stimulation could be related to several different realities, your
perceptual experience is constant.
Perceptual stability
What would gaming be like if size of objects was not constant?
o What kind of mistake would you make?
o Your aim might be off in a game, if you didn’t have grouping, you
wouldn’t recognize your team members in the game.
The Big gestalt weakness
Gestalt principles describe perceptual phenomena, they don’t explain
them
o How does the mind organize perception by familiarity, pragnanz,
good continuation, etc?
The bottom-up/ top-down framework.
Bottom-up… (visible spectrum) sounds appearing to be never ending
going up.
Template matching: if all the right features are present, you have a
perception of the object.
Recognition by components theory
Components (i.e. templates) used to build perceptual representations
of objects are simple 3D shapes called GEONs
By combinding different GEONs together, you can get a variety of
objects.
o Its not like you need a template for a coffee cup, a pen, and
different common thing.
o Combining different geons (shapes) to get different perceptions
of objects.
You can have a stable perceptual representation bc of the geons are still
there.
Top dwon…
knowledge, attention, goals, expectations, precious
Experience, etc… guide lower level processing.
someplates are prioritized over other.
some sensory systems &/or sensory features prioritized over others.
Helmholtz’s theory of unconscious inference
Top-down knowledge influence perception
o Hermann von helmhotlz
o Some of our perceptions are the result of unconscious
assumptions we make about the environment,
Likelihood principle: we perceive the world in the way that is “most likely”
based on our past experiences.
Bayesian inference
Quantitative model of helmholtz’s likelihood principle
o Balances probabilities about what is likely based on observation
(e.g. sensation)
Topdown physical regularities
We assume light is coming from above
Semantic regularities
We have also learned what types of objects “typically” occur in specific
types of scenes
Semantic (meaning) regularities
We know that toasters belong in kitchens, that eirplanes are at
airports, and guitars belong to rock band.
- Oliva& torralba (2007)
o What is the blob?- super blurred picture can be make out when
we recognize it even when its blurred
But what about top-down processes invovled in how you actively explore the
perceptual world?
Eye- movements
Object exploration
Purposeful weighting of perceptual features
Multitasking and other ongoing cognitive operations
*Attention*
