Sensation & Perception

Sensation: stimulation of sensory receptors to the primary area of brain responsible for detecting these signals.

Sensation & Perception

The truth is what you see?

Perception: assigning meaning of the incoming signal patterns.

Sensory Thresholds
Absolute threshold
~ The minimum amount of energy you can detect 50% of the time

Absolute Sensory Threshold

Difference threshold
~ Just Noticeable Difference (JND) ~ the minimum amount of change required for you to detect a difference ~ The JND increases with stimulus magnitude

Signal Detection Theory

~ decision making when uncertain involves 4 Possible Outcomes

Structure of the Eye: Retina

Rods ~ Black-and-white perception ~ Function well in low illumination Cones ~ Color perception ~ Operate best under high illumination Blind Spot ~ where optic nerve leaves the eyeball ~ no rods or cones

Color Vision
An object appears to be a particular color because of the wavelengths it reflects 3 cone populations are called S, M, & L Short, medium, long Different colors are determined by the ratio of activity among the 3 types of cones

Three dimensions of color

Hue ~ related to the wavelength of light Brightness ~ related to the amount of light emitted from or reflected by an object Saturation ~ related to the complexity of light waves or purity

Color Mixing
Subtractive color mixing ~ occurs within the stimulus and is a physical process e.g., paint mixing Additive color mixing ~ occurs when lights of different wavelengths are mixed e.g., stage lighting

Trichromatic theory
Young Helmholtz (1860) suggested eye contained 3 types of receptor: red, blue, green cones Blue hue, will exhaust all blue receptors and red and green receptors remain low activity Color Blindness ~ one or more cone types is failure

Opponent-Process theory
Hering-Hurvich (1950) Complementary color pairs: red- green blue-yellow Afterimage ~ result of rebound to the complementary color state when the illumination of the color is removed

Perception
How our brain and perceptual processes organize sensory information into perception? Feature Detectors: Highly-specialized cells in the visual cortex which will be stimulated by certain feature of the stimuli (e.g., line, angle, slope)

Two perception processes

Bottom-up processing: Perception is based on the basic features of the stimuli lower higher levels processing Top-down processing: Perception is based on perceivers perception /expectation rather than the features in the stimuli

Perceptual Constancies
Shape constancy: Changes in the image shape on the retina, but we still perceive the same shape.

Perceptual Constancies
Size constancy: Ability to perceive objects/ persons as the same size regardless of the distance of the objects/persons.

Visual Perception: Depth

The brain constructs perception of 3D from 2D images processed by the retina

Binocular Cues
Disparity: difference in the relative local of the objects image on the two retina gives rise to sensation of depth Convergence: conjugate inward and outward movement of eye ball to look at near and more distant objects

Visual Perception: Depth

Pictorial Cues for Depth:
Interposition: Nearer objects block part of the shape of the distant objects Relative size: nearer objects is larger than the objects in distant Texture gradient: when scene contains texture elements, closer elements are more clear and larger in size than distant elements are more blurry and smaller

Visual Perception: Depth

Linear perspective: two parallel lines, closer end are separate apart between each other more than far end Motion parallax: movement by our body that causes the distant objects image move relatively slower than the near objects image on the retina

Visual Perception: Depth

Light & shadow: Light and shadow gives people additional information about the environment, such as light source, thus creating sense of depth Height in the Field of View: Objects that are higher in your field of view are usually seen as being more distant

Relative size

Interposition

Linear perspective

Gestalt approach
Figure and Ground: Figure is where the patterns in the whole picture soliciting attention. Ground is where the patterns in the whole picture that do not attract attention.

5 principles of grouping elements in a picture into meaning perception: Proximity Closure Similarity Continuity Common region

Proximity

Closure

Similarity

Continuation

Common Region

Moon illusion
moon at horizon vs moon at zenith

Mller-Lyer illusion

Ponzo illusion

Horizontal-Vertical illusion

Ames Room