Unit 3 - Sensation and Perception

Sensation/Perception Part 2

• The five senses are vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell
• The brain cannot process information without these senses
• Sensation is the process where senses pick up information (visual, auditory, etc.) and send it to the brain. This information has not been interpreted.
• Perception is the process that actively organizes and interprets sensory information received by the brain.
• Stimulus filtering is the process of extracting meaningful information from sensory cues.
• Humans have sensory sensitivity to sounds used in speech.
• Sign stimuli are essential features of a stimulus necessary to elicit a specific behavioral response.
• Sign stimuli are often species-specific behaviours and promote survival. Examples are the red dot on a herring gull's bill, the red belly of a stickleback male, or egg-rolling in geese.

Attention

• Attention is a mental process that allows us to select relevant information from the environment.
• Attention is difficult to quantify.
• Early behaviourists tended to ignore attention, but cognitive psychologists showed its importance.
• Selective attention is the ability to focus on a limited range of sensory inputs while ignoring other inputs.
• The "cocktail party effect" is an example of this, where someone can focus on a conversation in a noisy room despite other conversations surrounding them.
• Eye-tracking experiments show this ability to focus on the relevant components of a person's face is important.
• Search image: A mental representation of a target used by foraging animals to locate it more efficiently.
• Sustained attention is the ability to focus on a single task in a sustained manner over time.
• Divided attention is the ability to process multiple sources of sensory information at once.

Memory

• Memory is the stored representation of past experiences used for later retrieval.
• Memory is a complex process that is central to many cognitive tasks.
• Encoding converts sensory input into neural signals for storage.
• Consolidation modifies encoded representations to stabilize them.
• Retrieval is the act of retrieving stored information when needed.
• Different types of memory include declarative memory (facts and events) and non-declarative memory (implicit and unconscious).
• Retrospection is the process of thinking/ recalling the past.
• Prospection is the process of thinking/imagining the future.
• Memory errors include proactive and retroactive interference.
• Retroactive interference occurs when new information interferes with the recall of old information.
• Proactive interference is when past information interferes with the recall of new information.
• Chunking reduces the amount of information to be processed in memory.

###Memory Processes

• Encoding is the conversion of incoming information into neural signals.
• Consolidation involves modifying encoded representations for longer-term storage.
• Retrieval is the process of retrieving stored information.
• Elaboration enhances encoding by adding meaning and context.
• Chunking groups information together to increase memory capacity.

Memory vs. Other Cognitive Processes

• Memory is necessary for cognitive processes such as categorization, because it's necessary to remember instances of a category or concept.
• Spatial memory, the ability to remember locations, is often studied through radial mazes and can be influenced by landmarks and cues.
• Memory evolves to accommodate changes in the environment. Without flexible memory, adapting to a constantly changing world would be impossible.

Attention and Memory

• Attention plays a crucial role in encoding.
• Information must be attended to for effective encoding.

Memory and Other Cognitive processes

• The types of memory and the different types of cognitive processes are all related. In fact, most cognitive and mental processes depend on memory.
• The study of memory in animals is often compared with the study of memory in humans.