Perception AP Psychology Flashcards

Perceptual Processes

• Perception involves selecting, organizing, and interpreting sensory data.
• Bottom-Up Processing: Starts from sensory receptors to brain; slower but more detailed.
• Top-Down Processing: Begins in the brain; utilizes prior experience to fill gaps in sensory information.

Theories of Perception

• Theory of Constructive Perception: Suggests perception is built from sensory elements using cognitive functions; infers whole structures from parts.
• Direct Perception: Relies on immediate environmental context; emphasizes intuition over complex interpretation.

Adaptation and Attention

• Adaptation: Temporary, often unconscious adjustments to environmental stimuli.
• Habitualization: Process of becoming accustomed to repeated stimuli.
• Dishabituation: Renewed attention to stimuli after a change.

Focused Awareness

• Attention: Concentrated focus on a narrow range of stimuli.
• Selective Attention: Involves prioritizing one stimulus over others.
• Cocktail Party Effect: Ability to focus on a single conversation in a noisy environment.

Perceptual Changes

• Change Blindness: Difficulty noticing changes in visual scenes; exemplified by individuals failing to recognize changes when directing others.
• Filter Theories: Suggest stimuli must pass through a filter to capture attention based on significance.
• Attentional Resource Theory: People have a limited amount of attention to allocate across tasks.

Divided Attention

• Divided Attention: Engaging in multiple activities simultaneously can split focus and hinder performance.

Illusions and Visual Processing

• Illusion: Misinterpretations of external stimuli can lead to altered perceptions.
• Visual Capture: Vision often overrides other senses, influencing perception of sound direction in media.

Gestalt Principles

• Gestalt Psychology: This approach emphasizes wholes over individual components in perception.
• Figure-Ground Relationship: Differentiating between focal points (figure) and background elements.
• Proximity: Grouping nearby elements together visually.
• Similarity: Clustering similar shapes or patterns as single entities.
• Continuity: Preference for smooth, continuous lines over abrupt changes.
• Connectedness: Perceiving connected figures as single units.
• Closure: Completing incomplete figures by filling in gaps.

Laws of Perception

• Law of Pragnanz: Stimuli are perceived in the simplest form possible.

Depth Perception

• Visual Cliff: Experimental setup to test depth perception in infants.
• Depth Perception: Understanding three-dimensional space; crucial for judging distances.

Binocular and Monocular Cues

• Binocular Cues: Depth perception cues requiring both eyes, like retinal disparity and convergence.
• Retinal Disparity: Brain's method of calculating depth based on differences in images from both eyes.
• Convergence: The inward angle of eyes when focusing on nearby objects.
• Monocular Cues: Depth cues observable with a single eye, including interposition and linear perspective.
• Relative Size: Perception that influences our judgment based on known sizes of objects.