Sensation & Perception Quiz

Sensation & Perception: Attention, Binding, and Visual Search

• A/Prof Piers Howe teaches the Sensation & Perception section of a subject and covers visual attention, object and scene perception, motion perception, color perception, depth and size perception, and audition.

• Two tutorials will focus on change blindness and visual search, respectively, with required and optional readings available.

• Howe's lecture style includes active learning through questions after each section and comprehensive slides that are examinable.

• Attention is the ability to preferentially process some parts of a stimulus at the expense of others, and it helps us avoid becoming overwhelmed by a limited perceptual capacity.

• Overt attention involves looking directly at an object, while covert attention involves looking at one object but attending to another.

• Attentional capture is an involuntary process that directs initial fixations to salient parts of a scene, while subsequent fixations are voluntary and goal-directed, influenced by expectations.

• Attention speeds responses, influences appearance and physiological responding, and solves the binding problem of how to combine individual features of a stimulus into a coherent percept.

• Illusory conjunctions occur when attention is inhibited and features from different objects are incorrectly bound together, as shown in Treisman & Schmidt's (1982) study and in patients with Balint's syndrome.

• Visual search requires binding, especially in conjunction searches where the target differs from distractors only by its particular combination of features.

• Feature Integration Theory predicts that attention needs to be applied to each object in turn during conjunction searches.

• Attention makes perception more vivid and efficient, but it is also limited and can be influenced by expectations and goals.

• Understanding attention, binding, and visual search is crucial to understanding how we perceive and interact with the visual world.Visual Attention and Change Blindness

• Visual attention is the process by which the brain selects and prioritizes sensory information for further processing.

• Attention can be directed by both bottom-up factors (stimulus-driven) and top-down factors (goal-driven).

• Feature searches, where the target has a unique feature, are predicted to be fast because binding does not need to occur.

• Conjunction searches, where the target shares features with distractors, are predicted to be slow because solving the binding problem is required.

• The binding problem refers to how the brain combines separate features (such as color and shape) into a single object.

• Change blindness occurs when changes in a scene go unnoticed because attention is not drawn to the location of the change.

• Motion transients, or changes in movement, can draw attention to changes in a scene and prevent change blindness.

• Change blindness can occur in both static pictures and the real world.

• To cause change blindness, the change needs to be missed when attention is not drawn to the location of the change but must be obvious when attention is drawn to the change.

• Salient objects, or those that stand out, are more likely to draw attention and be noticed.

• Experiment 2 of the required reading (Rensink et al., 1997) involves a change blindness experiment with complex and realistic scenes.

• Before the tutorial, it is important to view a video and read the required material to prepare for the experiment.

Sensation & Perception: Attention, Binding, and Visual Search

• A/Prof Piers Howe teaches the Sensation & Perception section of a subject and covers visual attention, object and scene perception, motion perception, color perception, depth and size perception, and audition.

• Two tutorials will focus on change blindness and visual search, respectively, with required and optional readings available.

• Howe's lecture style includes active learning through questions after each section and comprehensive slides that are examinable.

• Attention is the ability to preferentially process some parts of a stimulus at the expense of others, and it helps us avoid becoming overwhelmed by a limited perceptual capacity.

• Overt attention involves looking directly at an object, while covert attention involves looking at one object but attending to another.

• Attentional capture is an involuntary process that directs initial fixations to salient parts of a scene, while subsequent fixations are voluntary and goal-directed, influenced by expectations.

• Attention speeds responses, influences appearance and physiological responding, and solves the binding problem of how to combine individual features of a stimulus into a coherent percept.

• Illusory conjunctions occur when attention is inhibited and features from different objects are incorrectly bound together, as shown in Treisman & Schmidt's (1982) study and in patients with Balint's syndrome.

• Visual search requires binding, especially in conjunction searches where the target differs from distractors only by its particular combination of features.

• Feature Integration Theory predicts that attention needs to be applied to each object in turn during conjunction searches.

• Attention makes perception more vivid and efficient, but it is also limited and can be influenced by expectations and goals.

• Understanding attention, binding, and visual search is crucial to understanding how we perceive and interact with the visual world.Visual Attention and Change Blindness

• Visual attention is the process by which the brain selects and prioritizes sensory information for further processing.

• Attention can be directed by both bottom-up factors (stimulus-driven) and top-down factors (goal-driven).

• Feature searches, where the target has a unique feature, are predicted to be fast because binding does not need to occur.

• Conjunction searches, where the target shares features with distractors, are predicted to be slow because solving the binding problem is required.

• The binding problem refers to how the brain combines separate features (such as color and shape) into a single object.

• Change blindness occurs when changes in a scene go unnoticed because attention is not drawn to the location of the change.

• Motion transients, or changes in movement, can draw attention to changes in a scene and prevent change blindness.

• Change blindness can occur in both static pictures and the real world.

• To cause change blindness, the change needs to be missed when attention is not drawn to the location of the change but must be obvious when attention is drawn to the change.

• Salient objects, or those that stand out, are more likely to draw attention and be noticed.

• Experiment 2 of the required reading (Rensink et al., 1997) involves a change blindness experiment with complex and realistic scenes.

• Before the tutorial, it is important to view a video and read the required material to prepare for the experiment.