Cognitive Psychology PSYC 3342
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1969.6/96017
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Browsing Cognitive Psychology PSYC 3342 by Subject "perception"
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Item 03 Cognitive Psychology: Module 6(4/6/2023) Scarince, CollinModule 6: Sensation Versus Perception Perry's finger is still feeling a bit sensitive from touching his hot cup of cocoa. He feels a small jolt of pain each time he presses a computer key. Why does my finger feel like that? he wonders. He knows that nerves in his peripheral nervous system are sending signals to his central nervous system, but why does he feel the pain in his finger? He looks away from his bright computer monitor to ponder this question, and he notices his room appears dimmer than it should. After a few moments of looking around the room, he begins to see more details of the objects in his room. The lighting hasn't changed, but what Perry can see has changed. The topics of sensation and perception are among the oldest and most important in all of psychology. People are equipped with senses such as sight, hearing and taste that help us to take in the world around us. Amazingly, our senses have the ability to convert real-world information into electrical information that can be processed by the brain. The way we interpret this information—our perceptions—is what leads to our experiences of the world.Item 03 Cognitive Psychology: Module 7(4/6/2023) Scarince, CollinModule 7: Top-Down Processing and Visual Perception Gestalt Principles of Perception In the early part of the 20th century, Max Wertheimer (1912) published a paper demonstrating that individuals perceived motion in rapidly flickering static images—an insight that came to him as he used a child’s toy tachistoscope. Wertheimer, and his assistants Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, who later became his partners, believed that perception involved more than simply combining sensory stimuli (i.e., bottom-up processing). This belief led to a new movement within the field of psychology known as Gestalt psychology. The word gestalt literally means form or pattern, but its use reflects the idea that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. In other words, the brain creates a perception that is more than simply the sum of available sensory inputs, and it does so in predictable ways. Gestalt psychologists translated these predictable ways into principles by which we organize sensory information. In other words, there are predicable top-down processing effects for how we interpret ambiguous stimuli. As a result, Gestalt psychology has been extremely influential in the area of sensation and perception (Rock & Palmer, 1990).