Sensory/Perception, Attention, Cognition and Language

Perception- How we see, hear, smell, taste and touch

Visual and auditory stressed

Ex Optical illusion: Countour disappears when you stare at dot in middle.

They are functions more than illusion (not a mistake)

Our brains are better at seeing something better than other.

Eyes have tendency to focus- you let the rest of it go away.

You allow what is not focused on to become background.

Animals use contrast to confuse their predators. Zebras with white and black. When they are running
together, its hard to tell where it ends. (evolutioary advantage)

Optical illusions based on expectations we have-old lady and young lady. Some of it is built into us
because wiring and some built in with experience.

There is no red in picture- strawberries. Wiring of processing has means for adapting to what it
understands light source to be. Since blue background- you subtract the blue background(based on
experience) and you are able to process that its a red image.

Because we are adapted to care about certain things- ie.colors as they have evolutionary advantages.

Cylinder A and B are shame shade. When you take everything away, it becomes shaded. Humans use
patterns to predict the color even when its not there

Optical illusion are not a pathology of brain, its the proper functioning of the brain.

Sensation- Detection and encoding of physical energy of environment.

Perception- organize and encode our interpreteation.

Sensation (light) and perception is visual.

Auditory, you hear sound energy and perception is the hearing.

Sensation of heat, pressure and pain are involved in perception of touch.

Chemical and taste/smell.

Some animals can percieve UV light, EM waves(sharks) and IR light but humans cannot.

Migratory birds with internal compass.

Absolute threshold- lowest level of stimulus that you can detect half the time.

Its not steady/constant. It depends on how much attention you are spending. Sometimes you will be
able to register sound based on EEG reading that she has physically heard but she doesnt say she
heard sound (subliminally)- area where you start to lose detection.

Webers LAW; JND is constant proportion of the original stimulus

Ex: light intensity.

If we want to tell if one light is brighter or dimmer than another one.

100W. JND for light is 8%.

You need 108 to noticeable difference.

JND=8 for 100W or 92W depending on if it went up or down.

216W or more to tell a difference.

Memorize these constant proportions- light is 8%, weight is 2%, tones is 0.3%

Fixed value of 2 decibel difference. For the higher sound, you wont be able to tell the difference.

It is easier to tell the difference between higher tones.

JND=2lb. 2%

B and C are both correct. 15 and 18 difference.

2% of 50 is 1 pound. 1 pound/0.1lb= 10

But to to actually notice the difference, it has to be 9.

Signal detection Theory

When a particular receiver differs in its ability to detect a given stimulus.

Type II error is false negative.

External or internal noise. External- if other noise in the room. Internal noise- not being able to pay
attention for some information.

Requires two factors for detection:

Acquisition of information(quality of scan)

Application of criteria (how trained you are)

Which error is worse- type II error.

Receiver Operating curve-

Accuracy higher at TOP

Bottom right- you get everything wrong all the time.If you are at 0- always making misses and also
making false alarms.

Top right- you are saying always hit. (100% false rate)

Top left- is the best in ROC curves.

Aside from registering a stimulus. -Encoding- making sense of that once it is in the brain.

Two types of receptors: Tonic receptors- generate AP as long as stimulus exists. (duration and
intensity) Different parts of brain will fire and hold as long as you extend duration of stimulus.
Phasic receptors- fire only when stimulus begins- communicates change in stimulus. (act as alarms)

Sensory adaptation-

Decrease in AP when intensity of stimulus remains constant. (tonic)

Tonic receptors subject to adaptation. Will get used to something. If you change it again, phasic
recepors will trigger that change.

Habituation due to adapation.

Set of neurons that only fire when they see a vertical line for example(one feature)

You have all of these seperate functions that communicate together to communicate a coherent
experience.

Parallel processing: When everything processes simultaenously rather that serial processing.

Your brain is doing this in seperate processing centers.

Kinesthesis- Allows us to detect the positions of the body. Physical skills, implicit memories.

How body remembers how to do these thing.

Golgi tendons, muscle spindle, joint capsule receptors.

Perception-

Process of how you experience all of it.

Whether you engage in stimuli or not

Perceptor will feedback and create actions for dealing with certain stimuli.
Bottom up- gain information from sensory receptors and build it piece by piece to build an experience.
You dont have any idea of what you are looking at.

Top-down: when you end up seeing contextual experience and using notions already established.

You dont have to look at every word, you dont need to process features and letters and words
become automatic.

Getsalt psychology-

How we create sensory information into particular organization.

How we perceive based on experience.

How we organize information into a whole.

Drugs cut down ability of top down processing.

Emergence- infomation that you apply a top down template and see.

Figure and background- whats it the foregoround and background.

Laws of grouping- brain tries to make sense of real shapes. Fills in.

Law of similarity- shape made out of other shapes.

Depth perception-

Retina only sees in two dimension

All perceptual capacity to see depth- done in brain or done through experience.

Some are innate experiences of depth.

Infants would not cross depth.

Binocular cues-

Retinal disparity- light from that hit image hits right eye sooner than it hits left eye. The timing
difference is used to calculate how far the image is.

Convergence- extend to which eyes turn inward to face things that are closer.

Your brain can calculate movement of the eye to tell distance.

Monocular cues- built into brain and available to either eye alone.

Motion perception:

Things that are decreasing in size- moving away from us.

Increasing in size- moving towards us.

Phi phenomenon- we follow certain object even if it disappears.

Extrapolation during hunting as it goes behind an obstacle.

Perceptual constancy-

Why we perceive objects as unchanging even if factors change.

Built in through experience and ability to learn

Attention-

Way we attend to things depending what we pay attention to a perceive.

Active consciousness- focuses awareness.

Paying attention to some stimuli instead of others.

Selective attention- Resource and spot light model. Attention is a limited resource(certain energy for
attention which gets depleted), Spotlight- attention shifts focal points.

Broadbent filter model-

Attention as a selective filter which stops thing from coming through(unimportant)

Cognitive process have stacks of information that they care about. Filter that will let that piece of
information through. Allowing important information to get through filter.

Broad- information highway

Bent- detour: info gets lost.

Treisman attenuation model-

Sometimes we can get information through the filter that wasnt being consciously allowed through.

Filter turns down or attenuates.

Information not attended to decays.

Ex: Hearing your name at a party. Some pieces of information will go through to higher processing.

Little pieces of information that will be grabbed subliminally.

Message do get through and are engaged in higher level processing compared to broadbent which
suggest unattended message does not get through.

Divided attention- how well you can multi-task.

If you do more than one things that require the same processing- can detrimentally affect it.

Something that does not involve the same processing= least distraction.
Its better to pay attention doing complicated things.

Social facilitation- tasks that are well practice performed better when people are watching.

If things are simple and easy and you are doing a bunch of tasks that are similar- much easier to
multi-task.

Cognition:

Processing information- problem solving, decision making.

Baddely model of working memory-

Requires three subset of information processing that is controlled by central exceutive.

Supervisor and three workers- workers are related to different processing and different perceptual
information.

Episodic buffer-memory.

Engaging in visual information, semantic information.

If what is happening through your ear is worth paying attention to.

Working memory- take perception and turn them into information.

Schema- Information is organized into mental frameworks.

They are intedned as top-down processing systems. You dont have to continually think of these
things bottom-up.

Ideas can have a more precise meaning

Schema- general location of a certain type of information.

Memory functions as a network.

Schemas can be basic and misleading at times.

Sometimes presented with things that dont make sense to us.

Piagets contribution to cognition:

What kinds of problems children are able to solve.

Sensorimotor- senses and body movement.

Milestones- point at which can recognize the child has moved into this phase.

From being a total infant- you can develop these things.

Object permanence.
Operational stages-

Pre-operational (operational=thought work)- people use ideas and images and represent them

Not alot of logical processing.

Not a lot of work for manipulating these ideas.

As soon as you have a word for something-primitive schema.

Concrete operational-show they can perform simple manipulations.

Conservation- tall glass of water and shorter glass. Fill the tall glass and pour it infront of the child.

Ask the child which has more water. Children in pre-operational phase- wont tell you its same water.

They represent the glass size.

Formal operational- Wide range of capacity for formal operation.

Have abstract hypothetical problems. (Algebra)

If they are using words- preoperational. They cant think of the process.

Moral identity-

Lawrence Kohlberg.

How we make decisions and solve problems about moral choices:

Pre-conventional- conditioning(operant)

You do things not because its right or wrong. You do this to avoid punishment.

Conventions- following social norms.

People make decisions based on what is approved by their community.

Post-conventional-applying logic to justice. Whats the right thing to do even if its not the social norm.

Challenging ideals. Legal challenge. Challenge social norms themselves.

Problem solving-

Trial and error:

Algorithm- not intuitive

Heuristic- mental rule of thumb

Insight-Occurs when we puzzle over the problem. Then solution comes all at once.

Brain does have a smarter system for identifying the components.

Confirmation bias- problems with relying on top down schemas.

We see only see what we wish to see. If you look for evidence that supports your own conclusion,
bias.

Scientific method seeks to overcome this.

It seeks evidence that refutes the hypothesis.

Fixation

Proces of think inside the box.

Ex: Looking at structure of DNA the wrong way.

Functional fixedness- how an object can be used.

Pen tracheotomy- poke a hole in trachea.

Availability heurisitic-

Relying on expectations.

Overestimate probablility of something happening because we have examples of it happening

Media- if you are afraid of something. People have phobias of flying> driving.
Much more dangerous to drive.

You hear about these plane crashes and think thats more dangerous.

People are afraid of terrorism but relative probability is low.

Representative heuristic-

Estimate likelihood of something happening by comparing it to an existing prototype.

Sexist assumption of surgeon as male.

First thing that happens into mind.

Intelligence:

Related to cognition.

Capacity to solve problem.

Ability to learn from things and adapt to environment.

IQ- general knowledge.

Biased towards certain cultural knowledge and type of education. They are testing standard for
education and general culture.

Social and emotional complexities.

Fluid intelligence- more hands on.

Nature vs nurture- monozyogtic twins. Similarity in intelligence in twins raised together.

MZ twins raised further apart. Good correlation.

Some genetic component but different environment.

With aging- semantic network improved.

Ability to code information improves.

Procesing speed declines.

Implicit memory and recognition memory remains stable.

Language-

Behaviourist model

Pioneering approaches.

People are trained to learn language.

Nativist approach- people are born with innate ability to learn language. Hard-wired to develop
language.

We have some wiring not only operant conditioning.

Between ages 3-7. Children are language sponges. If a child has to move to a different place where
they have to learn a new language.

After 7-8, much slower for children to learn.

Sapir Whorf hypothesis-

Language impacts thought.

Problem solving- you tend to thing in words and symbols.

You are able to thing with tools you have(language is one of your tools)

If you are trying to do math and you dont have multiplication/division as part of language but know
how to add/subtract. Mult/div- cannot think about them as they are not in your language.

You are not able to do different type of thinking without being aware of those.

If you know the language- you can understand better.

Broaca area- inferior frontal gyrus- important for language production.

If you damage to this area. Non-fluent aphasia.

Fluent=speaking

Non-fluent aphasia- non speaking aphasia- problem with words.

You have problems with speaking as you have problems with speec production.

Process of understanding is encoded in another area.

Fluent aphasia= you can speak but cannot understand.

Wernicke.

Broaca- language output (damage= cannot speak)

Wernick- language input (damage=cannot understand)

Speech damage- broaca. But could understand.