29/8/2022

COG4013

Chapter 3
Sensation & Perception

PSY1006

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Some Questions to Consider

• Why can two different people experience different

perceptions in response to the same stimulus?
• How does perception depend on a person’s
knowledge about characteristics of the
environment?
• How does the brain become tuned to respond best
to things likely to appear in the environment?
• How are perception and memory represented in
the brain?

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Perception Is…

• Experience resulting from stimulation of the senses

• Organize, identify and interpret sensory information
for representing and understanding the
environment.
• Basic concepts
– Perceptions can change based on added information
– Involves a process similar to reasoning or problem
solving
– Perceptions occur in conjunction with actions

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Perception Is…

• It is possible that true human perceptual

processes are unique to humans
• Attempts to create artificial forms of
perception (machines) have been met with
limited success, and each time have had
problems that could not be solved

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Why Is It So Difficult to
Design a Perceiving Machine?
• Inverse Projection Problem
– Refers to the task of determining the object responsible for a
particular image on the retina
– Involves starting with the retinal image and then extending
outward to the source of that image
• Objects can be hidden or blurred
– People can often identify objects that are obscured and
therefore incomplete, or in some cases objects that are blurry
• Objects look different from different viewpoints
– Viewpoint invariance

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Approaches to Understand Perception

• Direct perception theories

– Bottom-up processing
– Perception comes from stimuli in the environment
– Parts are identified and put together, and then
recognition occurs
• Constructive perception theories
– Top-down processing
– People actively construct perceptions using
information based on expectations

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The Complexity of Perception

• Bottom-up processing
– Perception may start with the senses
– Incoming raw data
– Energy registering on receptors
• Top-down processing
– Perception may start with the brain
– Person’s knowledge, experience, expectations
– Previous experience or expectations are used
to recognize stimuli

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The Complexity of Perception

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The Complexity of Perception

contextual information
impacts the efficiency
of object detection and
recognition tasks!

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Hearing Words in a Sentence

• When you hear words in a sentence spoken in a

foreign language, your ability to pick out or
understand certain words based on context
demonstrates top-down processing (e.g., listening
to a baseball game that is broadcast in Spanish
may make it easier to hear players names or
certain “baseball-related” words)
• Speech segmentation
– The ability to tell when one word ends and another
begins

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Experiencing Pain

• Direct Pathway model

– An early model that emphasized nociceptors that
would send pain messages directly to the brain
– A bottom-up processing model
– More recent models have found that expectations,
attention, and distraction can affect how we
experience pain in a “top-down” manner
• The Placebo Effect

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Helmholtz’s Theory Of
Unconscious Inference (~1860)
• Top-down theory
• Some of our perceptions are the result of
unconscious assumptions we make about the
environment
– We use our knowledge to inform our perceptions
• We infer much of what we know about the world
• Likelihood principle: we perceive the world in the
way that is “most likely” based on our past
experiences

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Helmholtz’s Theory Of
Unconscious Inference (~1860)

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Perceptual Organization
• “Old” view –
structuralism
– Perception involves
adding up sensations
• “New” view – Gestalt
psychologists
– The mind groups
patterns according to
laws of perceptual
organization (smaller
objects are grouped to
perceive larger object)
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Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization

The whole is different from the sum of its parts

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Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization

• Law of good continuation

– Lines tend to be seen as following the
smoothest path

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Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization

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Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization

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Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization

• Law of pragnanz (simplicity or good figure)

– Every stimulus pattern is seen so the resulting
structure is as simple as possible

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Gestalt Laws of Perceptual

Organization

• Law of similarity
– Similar things
appear
grouped
together

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Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization

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Physical Regularities

• Oblique effect
– People can perceive verticals and horizontals
more easily than other orientations
• Light-from-above assumption
– Light comes from above
– Is usually the case in the environment
– We perceive shadows as specific information
about depth and distance

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Light-from-above assumption

• These pictures were taken on a sand beach.

In each pair, the image on the right was turned upside down.

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Physical Regularities

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Semantic Regularities

• The meaning of a given scene

• semantic regularities are the characteristics
associated with the functions carried out in different
types of scenes.
• A scene schema is the knowledge of what a given
scene ordinarily contains (e.g., if you think of a
professor’s office, what would you expect to find/see
there?)
• what we expect to see in different contexts influences
our interpretation of the identity of certain objects in
the scene

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Bayesian Inference

• Thomas Bayes (1701-1761)

• One’s estimate of the probability of a given
outcome is influenced by two factors:
a. The prior probability (our initial belief about the
probability of an outcome)
b. The likelihood of a given outcome
Ex: It has rained the last two days, so that increases the
chances that it will rain again tomorrow
• These factors set up an equation, as seen in figure
3.26

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Bayesian Inference

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Neurons and the Environment

• Some neurons respond best to things that occur

regularly in the environment
• Neurons becomes tuned to respond best to what
we commonly experience
– Experience-dependent plasticity:
• process of the creation and organization of neuron
connections that occurs as a result of a person's
life experiences.

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Neurons and the Environment

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Movement Facilitates Perception

• Movement helps us perceive things in our

environment more accurately than static, still
images
– For example, a horse in the distance standing still may be
more difficult to discern than the horse walking across the
field
– Walking around that same horse to see it from different
angles will also facilitate accurate perception

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The Interaction of Perception and Action

• Our actions within or upon the

environment around us involve a constant
stream of updating perceptions and
recognition of very subtle changes

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Perception and Action: What and Where

• What stream: identifying an object

• Where stream: identifying the object’s location

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Perception and Action: What and Where

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