MODULE 4.3 INTERPRETING SENSORY INFORMATION
They can also be wrong in two ways: failing
Perceiving Minimal Stimuli Some of the earliest
psychological researchers tried to determine the
weakest sounds, lights, and touches that people could
detect. They also measured the smallest difference that
people could detect between one stimulus and
another—the just noticeable difference (JND).
Sensory Thresholds and Signal Detection Imagine a
typical experiment to determine your threshold of
hearing—that is, the minimum intensity that you can
hear: On each trial, the experimenter presents either no
tone or a faint tone, and you report hearing or not
hearing something. Notice that no sharp line separates
sounds that people hear from sounds they do not.
Researchers therefore define an absolute sensory
threshold as the intensity at which a given individual
detects a stimulus 50 percent of the time. However,
people sometimes report hearing a tone when none
was present. We should not be surprised. Throughout
the study, they have been listening to faint tones and
saying “yes” when they heard almost nothing. The
difference between nothing and almost nothing is slim.
Still, if someone reports a tone when present, but you
will be fined 1 cent if you say “yes” when it is absent.
When you are in doubt, you guess “yes,” with results
like those in. Then the rules change: You receive a 1-
cent reward for correctly reporting the presence of a
light, but you suffer a 10-cent penalty and an electrical
shock if you report a light when it was absent. Now you
say “yes” only when certain, with results like those in.
People become cautious about false alarms for other
reasons, too. In one experiment, participants were
asked to read words that flashed briefly on a screen.
They performed well with ordinary words such as river
or peach. For emotionally loaded words such as penis or
bitch, however, they generally said they were not sure
what they saw. Several explanations are possible (e.g.,
G. S. Blum & Barbour, 1979). One is that participants
hesitate to blurt out an emotionally charged word
unless they are certain they are right.
The signal-detection approach is important in many
settings remote from the laboratory. For none was
present, we have to be cautious in interpreting the
other responses. How often were they really hearing
something, and how often were they just guessing?
When people try to detect weak stimuli, they can be
correct in two ways: reporting the presence of a
stimulus (a “hit”) and reporting its absence (a “correct
rejection”).
to detect a stimulus (a “miss”) and reporting it present
when it was absent (a “false alarm”).
Signal-detection theory is the study of people’s
tendencies to make hits, correct rejections, misses, and
false alarms (D. M. Green & Swets, 1966). The theory
originated in engineering, where it applies to such
matters as detecting radio signals in the presence of
noise. Suppose someone reports a stimulus present on
80 percent of the trials when the stimulus is present.
That statistic is meaningless unless we also know how
often the person said it was present when it was not. If
the person also reported the stimulus present on 80
percent of trials when it was absent, then the person is
just guessing. In a signal-detection experiment, people’s
responses depend on their willingness to risk misses or
false alarms. (When in doubt, you have to risk one or
the other.) Suppose you are the participant and you are
told that you will receive a 10-cent reward whenever
you correctly report that a light is example, the legal
system is also a signal-detection situation. A jury can be
right in two ways and wrong in two ways: Defendant is
guilty Defendant is innocent Jury votes “guilty” Hit False
alarm Jury votes “not guilty” Miss Correct rejection.
Judges instruct juries to vote “not guilty” when in doubt.
A miss, setting a guilty person free, is more acceptable
than a false alarm that convicts an innocent person.
Another example is screening baggage at an airport.
Screeners can err by thinking they see a weapon that is
not present, or missing one that is there. A special
problem in this case is that extremely few air travelers
actually pack weapons. If you haven’t seen a weapon in
weeks, you expect not to see one, and you probably
overlook a weapon even if you do see it (Mitroff &
Biggs, 2014; Wolfe, Horowitz, & Kenner, 2005). Forcing
people to slow down doesn’t help much (Kunar, Rich, &
Wolfe, 2010). (It just slows down the line at airport
security.) Radiologists encounter a related problem. A
radiologist might scan through hundreds of X-ray scans,
looking for small nodules that might indicate illness.
With increasing expertise, they do find most of them,
but they sometimes overlook something they hadn’t
expected to see. In one study, 24 expert radiologists
examined chest scans of five people, looking for
nodules. In the fifth one, researchers had added a
drawing of a gorilla. Although they found most of the
nodules, only 4 of the 24 noticed the gorilla (Drew, Võ, &
Wolfe, 2013).
Suppose a particular chemical is present in 90 percent
of people with a particular kind of cancer. What, if
anything, can we conclude? Think about this problem
in terms of signal detection. Answer: We cannot
conclude anything. After all, 100 percent of people
with cancer have water in their bodies. The 90 percent
figure means nothing unless we know how many
people without cancer also have this chemical
Subliminal perception is the phenomenon that a
stimulus can influence behavior even when it is
presented so faintly or briefly that the observer has no
conscious perception of it. (Limen is Latin for
“threshold.” Thus, subliminal means “below the
threshold.”) Is subliminal perception powerful,
impossible, or something in between?
What Subliminal Perception Doesn’t Do Many years
ago, claims were made that subliminal messages could
control people’s buying habits. For example, a theater
owner might insert a single frame, “EAT POPCORN,” in
the middle of a film. Viewers, unaware of the message,
supposedly would flock to the concession stand to buy
popcorn. Many tests of this hypothesis found little or no
effect (Cooper & Cooper, 2002), and the advertiser
eventually admitted he had no evidence (Pratkanis,
1992). Another claim is that certain rock-’n’-roll
recordings contain “satanic” messages that were
recorded backward and superimposed on the songs.
Some people allege that listeners unconsciously
perceive these messages and then follow the evil
advice. If you spend hours listening to rock music played
backward— and I hope you have something better to do
with your time—with some imagination you can think
you hear a variety of messages, regardless of whether
the artists intended any such thing. However, for
practical purposes it doesn’t matter, because repeated
studies have found that when you listen to music played
forward, you cannot decipher any backward message,
and any backward message has no effect on your
behavior (Kreiner, Altis, & Voss, 2003; Vokey & Read,
1985). A third unsupported claim: “Subliminal
audiotapes” with faint, inaudible messages can help
you improve your memory, quit smoking, lose weight, or
raise your self-esteem. In one study, psychologists asked
more than 200 volunteers to listen to a popular brand of
audiotape. However, they intentionally mislabeled
some of the self-esteem tapes as “memory tapes” and
some of the memory tapes as “self-esteem tapes.” After
a month of listening, most people who thought they
were listening to self-esteem tapes said they had
improved their self-esteem, and those who thought
they were listening to memory tapes said they had
improved their memory. The actual content made no
difference. The improvement depended on people’s
expectations, not the tapes (Greenwald, Spangenberg,
Pratkanis, & Eskanazi, 1991)
What Subliminal Perception Can Do Subliminal
messages do produce effects, although most are brief
or subtle. For example, in several studies, people
viewed pictures of faces with neutral, pleasant, or
unpleasant expressions for a tiny fraction of a second,
followed by an interfering pattern. Under these
conditions, people have no conscious perception of the
face. However, after seeing a happy face, they usually
move their facial muscles briefly and slightly in the
direction of a smile, and after seeing an angry face,
they tense their muscles slightly in the direction of a
frown (Dimberg, Thunberg, & Elmehed, 2000). If they
view a face with an expression subliminally and shortly
thereafter see the same face longer, with a neutral
expression, they are more likely to evaluate the face
favorably if the subliminal face had a pleasant
expression, and to evaluate it unfavorably if the
subliminal face had an unpleasant expression
(Prochnow et al., 2013). In another study, young men
viewed a variety of pictures for a tiny fraction of a
second, followed by interfering pictures, and had no
conscious response to any of them. However, some of
the pictures showed naked loving couples. After those
pictures, the men’s brains showed increased activity in
reward-related areas (Oei, Both, van Heemst, & van der
Grond, 2014). Subliminal perception effects emerge
only as small changes in average performance,
ordinarily in measurements taken shortly after the
subliminal stimulus. However, the fact that such effects
occur at all demonstrates the possibility of unconscious
influences (Greenwald & Draine, 1997).
16. Suppose someone claims that broadcasting the
subliminal words “Don’t shoplift,” intermixed with
music at a store, decreases shoplifting. What would be
the best way to test that claim? Answer 16. Play that
message on half of all days, randomly chosen, for a
period of weeks. On other days, play no subliminal
message or an irrelevant one. See whether the
frequency of shoplifting decreases on days with the
message.
Perceiving and Recognizing Patterns People become
amazingly good at recognizing objects and patterns. For
example, you may someday go to a high school reunion
and see people you haven’t seen in many years. Some
have grown fat or bald, or changed in other ways, but
you will still recognize many of them (Bruck, Cavanagh,
& Ceci, 1991). Although we recognize people mostly by
facial features, we attend to the hair also.
How do we recognize people, objects, or any patterns at
all? According to one explanation, we begin by breaking
a stimulus into its parts. For example, when we look at a
letter of the alphabet, specialized neurons in the visual
cortex, called feature detectors, respond to the
presence of simple features, such as lines and angles.
One neuron might detect the feature “horizontal line,”
while another detects a vertical line, and so forth.
what’s the evidence?
First Study
Hypothesis Neurons in the visual cortex of cats and
monkeys respond only when light strikes the retina in a
particular pattern.
Method Two pioneers in the study of the visual cortex,
David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel (1981 Nobel Prize
winners in physiology and medicine), inserted thin
electrodes into cells of the occipital cortex of cats and
monkeys and recorded the cells’ activity as various light
patterns struck the animals’ retinas. At first, they used
mere points of light that produced little response. Later
they tried lines.
Results They found that each cell responds best in the
presence of a particular stimulus (Hubel & Wiesel,
1968). Some cells become active only at the sight of a
vertical bar of light. Others become active only for a
horizontal bar. In other words, the cells appear to be
feature detectors. Later investigators found cells that
respond to other features, such as movement in a
particular direction.
Interpretation Hubel and Wiesel reported feature
detector neurons in cats and monkeys. If the
organization of the visual cortex is similar in species as
distantly related as cats and monkeys, it is likely (though
not certain) to be similar in humans as well.
A second line of evidence follows this reasoning: If the
human cortex has feature-detector cells,
overstimulation of certain cells should fatigue them.
Afterward, someone should see an aftereffect based on
the inactivity of that those cells. (Recall negative color
afterimages.
An example is the waterfall illusion: If you stare at a
waterfall for a minute or more and then turn your eyes
to nearby cliffs, the cliffs appear to flow upward.
Staring at the waterfall fatigues neurons that respond to
downward motion. When they fatigue, they become
inactive, while neurons responding to upward motion
remain active. The result is an illusion of upward
motion.
Here is another demonstration: Second Study
Hypothesis After you stare at vertical lines, you fatigue
feature detectors responding to lines of that width. If
you then look at wider or narrower lines, they will
appear to be even wider or narrower than they really
are. Method Cover the right half of ▲ Figure 4.38 and
stare at the little rectangle in the middle of the left half
for a minute or more. Do not stare at one point, but
move your focus around within the rectangle. Then look
at the square in the center of the right part of the figure
and compare the spacing between the lines of the top
and bottom gratings (Blakemore & Sutton, 1969).
Results What did you perceive in the right half? People
generally report that the top lines look narrower and
the bottom lines look wider. Interpretation Staring at
the left part of the figure fatigues neurons sensitive to
wide lines in the top part of the figure and neurons
sensitive to narrow lines in the bottom part. Then, when
you look at lines of medium width, the fatigued cells are
inactive. Cells sensitive to narrower lines dominate your
perception in the top part, and those sensitive to wider
lines dominate in the bottom part. To summarize, two
types of evidence support the existence of visual feature
detectors: (a) The brains of other species contain cells
with the properties of feature detectors, and (b) after
staring at certain patterns, we see aftereffects that imply
fatigue of feature-detector cells in the brain. The
research on feature detectors started an enormous
amount of activity by laboratories throughout the
world. Later results revised our views of what the earlier
results mean. For example, even though certain neurons
respond well to a single vertical line, most respond even
more strongly to a sine-wave grating of lines: Thus, the
feature that cells detect is probably more complex than
just a line. Furthermore, because each cell responds to a
range of stimuli, no cell provides an unambiguous
message about what you see at any moment. An
important point about scientific advances: A single line
of evidence—even Nobel Prize–winning evidence—
seldom provides the final answer to a question. We look
for multiple ways to test a hypothesis.
What is a feature detector
A feature detector is a neuron that responds mostly to
a particular visual feature, such as a straight horizontal
line.
Do Feature Detectors Explain Perception?
The neurons just described are active in the early stages
of visual processing. Do we simply add up the responses
from various feature detectors to perceive a face? No,
feature detectors cannot completely explain how we
perceive letters, much less faces. For example, we
perceive the words in as CAT and HAT, even though the
H and A symbols are identical.
Gestalt Psychology
Your ability to perceive something in more than one
way, is the basis of Gestalt psychology, a field that
emphasizes perception of overall patterns. Gestalt
(geh-SHTALT) is a German word that means pattern or
configuration. The founders of Gestalt psychology
rejected the idea of breaking down a perception into
its component parts. A melody broken into individual
notes is no longer a melody. Their slogan was, “The
whole is different from the sum of its parts.
Gestalt psychology does not deny the importance of
feature detectors. It merely insists that feature
detectors are not enough. Feature detectors represent a
bottom-up process, in which tiny elements combine to
produce larger items. However, perception also includes
a top-down process, in which you apply your
experience and expectations to interpret each item in
context.
In either the top or bottom part, you might see only
meaningless black and white patches for a while and
then suddenly you might see an animal. To perceive the
animals, you separate figure and ground—that is, you
distinguish the object from the background. Ordinarily,
you make that distinction almost instantly. You become
aware of the process only when it is difficult (as it is
here). In effect, we test hypotheses: “Is this the front of
the object or is that the front? Is this section the
foreground or the background?” The longer you look at
a reversible figure, the more frequently you alternate
between one perception and another (Long & Toppine,
2004). Part a is called the Necker cube, after the into
one perception so tightly that they do not see the other
one. The 8-year-old girl who drew part d intended it as a
face. Can you find another possibility? If you have
trouble with parts c or d, check answers E, F, and G on
page 140. The point of the reversible figures is that we
perceive by imposing order (top-down), not just by
adding up lines and points (bottom-up). psychologist
who first called attention to it. Which is the front face of
the cube? You can see it either way. Part b is either a
vase or two profiles. Does part c show an old woman or
a young woman? Almost everyone sees one or the other
immediately, but many people lock tendency to
perceive objects that are close together as belonging
to a group. The objects in part a form two groups
because of their proximity. The tendency to perceive
similar as being a group is, quite reasonably, called
similarity. In part b, we group the Xs together and the
●’s together because of similarity. When lines are
interrupted, as in part c, we perceive continuation, a
filling in of the gaps. You probably perceive this
illustration as a recctangle covering the center of a very
long hot dog. When a familiar figure is interrupted, as in
part d, we perceive a closure of the figure; that is, we
imagine the rest of the figure to see something that is
simple, symmetrical, or consistent with our past
experience (Shimaya, 1997).
In what way does the phenomenon of reversible
figures conflict with the idea that feature detectors
fully explain vision? Answer 18. If vision were simply a
matter of stimulating feature detectors and adding up
their responses, then a given display would always
produce the same perception.
The principle of closure resembles continuation. With a
complicated pattern, however, closure deals with more
information. For example, in Figure 4.42c, you fill in the
gaps to perceive one long hot dog. With additional
context, you might perceive the same pattern as two
shorter hot dogs:
Another Gestalt principle is common fate: We perceive
objects as part of the same group if they change or
move in similar ways at the same time. If you see two
objects move in the same direction and speed, you see
them as parts of the same thing, as in ▲ Figure 4.43.
Also, if they grow brighter or darker together, you see
them as related (Sekuler & Bennett, 2001). Finally, when
possible, we tend to perceive a good figure—a simple,
familiar, symmetrical figure. Many familiar objects are
geometrically simple or close to it: The sun and moon
are round, tree trunks meet the ground at almost a right
angle, faces and animals are nearly symmetrical, and so
forth. If we can interpret something as a circle, square,
or straight line, we do.
Does the principle of good figure apply only in
Westernized societies, where people become familiar
with squares, triangles, and so forth from an early age?
Apparently not. Researchers studied the Himba, a
southwest African culture with no manufactured
products and few words for shapes. Even they noticed
the difference between squares and almost-square
shapes, about as well as U.S. college students did
(Biederman, Yue, & Davidoff, 2009).
Similarities between Vision and Hearing The perceptual
organization principles of Gestalt psychology apply to
hearing also. Like reversible figures, some sounds can be
heard in more than one way. You can hear a clock going
“tick, tock, tick, tock” or “tock, tick, tock, tick.” You can
hear your windshield wipers going “dunga, dunga” or
“gadung, gadung.” The Gestalt principles of continuation
and closure work best when one item interrupts
something else.
The same is true in hearing. If a speech or song is
broken up by periods of silence, we do not fill in the
gaps and we find the utterance hard to understand.
However, if the same gaps are filled with noise, we
“hear” what probably occurred during the gaps. That
is, we apply continuation and closure (C. T. Miller,
Dibble, & Hauser, 2001; Warren, 1970).
Perceiving Movement and Depth As an automobile
moves away from us, its image on the retina grows
smaller, but we perceive it as moving, not shrinking.
That perception illustrates visual constancy—our
tendency to perceive objects as keeping their shape,
size, and color, despite distortions in the actual pattern
reaching the retina.
Perception of Movement Moving objects capture
attention for a good reason. Throughout our
evolutionary history, moving objects have been more
likely than stationary objects to require action. A moving
object might be another person, or something you could
catch and eat, or something that wants to catch and eat
you. People are particularly adept at perceiving a body
in motion. Suppose we attach small lights to someone’s
shoulders, elbows, hands, hips, knees, and ankles. Then
we turn out all other lights so that you see just the lights
on this person. As soon as the person starts to walk, you
see the lights as a person in motion. In fact, you have a
brain area specialized for just this task (Grossman &
Blake, 2001). If you do an Internet search for Biomotion,
you can find a marvelous illustration of this process.
Try this simple demonstration: Hold an object in front of
your eyes and then move it to the right. Now hold the
object in front of your eyes and move your eyes to the
left. The image of the object moves across your retina in
the same way when you move the object as when you
move your eyes. Yet you perceive the object as moving
in one case but not in the other. Why? The object looks
stationary when you move your eyes for two reasons.
One is that the vestibular system informs the visual
areas of the brain about your head and eye movements.
When your brain knows that your eyes have moved to
the left, it interprets what you see as the result of eye
movement. One man with a rare kind of brain damage
could not connect his eye movements with his
perceptions. Whenever he moved his head or eyes, the
world appeared to be moving. Frequently, he became
dizzy and nauseated (Haarmeier, Thier, Repnow, &
Petersen, 1997). The other reason is that you perceive
motion when an object moves relative to the
background (Gibson, 1968). When you walk, stationary
objects move across your retina but do not move
relative to the background.
What do you perceive when an object is stationary and
the background moves? In that unusual case, you
incorrectly perceive the object as moving, a
phenomenon called induced movement. When you
watch clouds moving across the moon, you might
perceive the clouds as stationary and the moon as
moving. Induced movement is apparent movement, as
opposed to real movement. You have already read
about the waterfall illusion (page 129), another example
of apparent movement. Yet another is stroboscopic
movement, an illusion of movement created by a rapid
succession of stationary images. When a scene flashes
on a screen, followed a split second later by a slightly
different scene, you perceive objects as moving
smoothly.
Perception of Depth Although we live in a world of
three dimensions, our retinas are in effect two-
dimensional surfaces. Depth perception, the perception
of distance, enables us to experience the world in
three dimensions. This perception depends on several
factors. One factor is retinal disparity—the difference
in the apparent position of an object as seen by the left
and right retinas. Try this: Hold a finger at arm’s length.
Focus on it with one eye and then the other. Note that
the apparent position of your finger shifts with respect
to the background. Now hold your finger closer to your
face and repeat. The apparent position of your finger
shifts even more. The amount of discrepancy between
the two eyes is one way to gauge distance. A second cue
for figure and groundis the convergence of the eyes—
that is, the degree to which they turn in to focus on a
close object. When you focus on something close, your
eyes turn in, and you sense the tension of your eye
muscles. The more the muscles pull, the closer the
object must be. Retinal disparity and convergence are
called binocular cues because they depend on both
eyes. Monocular cues enable you to judge depth and
distance with just one eye or when both eyes see the
same image. The ability to interpret depth in a picture
depends on experience.
Object size: Other things being equal, a nearby object
produces a larger image than a distant one. This cue
helps only for objects of known size. For example, the
backpacker in Figure 4.50 produces a larger image than
do the mountains, which we know are larger. So we see
the person as closer. However, the mountains in the
background differ in actual as well as apparent size, so
we cannot assume the ones that look bigger are closer.
Linear perspective: As parallel lines stretch out toward
the horizon, they come closer together. Examine the
road in Figure 4.50. At the bottom of the photo (close to
the viewer), the edges of the road are far apart. At
greater distances they come together. Detail: We see
nearby objects, such as the backpacker, in more detail
than distant objects.
Interposition: A nearby object interrupts our view of a
more distant object. For example, the tree on the right
interrupts our view of the mountains, so we see that the
tree is closer than the mountains. Texture gradient: The
bushes and leaves on the left of the photo are more
clearly separated, whereas those toward the center look
less distinct from one another. The “packed together”
appearance of objects gives us another cue to their
approximate distance.
Shadows: Shadows help us gauge sizes as well as
locations of objects.
Accommodation: The lens of the eye accommodates—
that is, it changes shape—to focus on nearby objects,
and your brain detects that change and thereby infers
the distance to an object. Accommodation could help
tell you how far away the photograph itself is, although
it provides no information about the relative distances
of objects in the photograph.
Motion parallax: Another monocular cue helps us
perceive depth while we are moving, although it does
not help with a photograph. If you are walking or riding
in a car and fixating at the horizon, nearby objects move
rapidly across the retina, while those farther away move
less. The difference in speed of movement of images
across the retina as you travel is the principle of
motion parallax. Television and film crews use this
principle. If the camera moves slowly, you see closer
objects move more than distant ones and get a sense of
depth.
Optical Illusions Vision is well adapted to
understanding what we see, but special situations can
fool it. An optical illusion is a misinterpretation of a
visual stimulus. Psychologists would like to explain the
optical illusions as simply and parsimoniously as
possible. One approach that applies to many but not all
illusions pertains to mistakes of depth perception.
The Moon Illusion To most people, the moon at the
horizon appears about 30 percent larger than it
appears when it is higher in the sky. This moon illusion
is so convincing that many people have tried to explain
it by referring to the bending of light rays by the
atmosphere or other physical phenomena. However, if
you photograph the moon and measure its image, you
will find that it is the same size at the horizon as it is
higher in the sky. You can measure the two images to
demonstrate that they are really the same size. (The
atmosphere’s bending of light rays makes the moon look
orange near the horizon, but it does not increase the
size of the image.) However, photographs do not
capture the strength of the moon illusion as we see it in
real life. In Figure 4.58 or any similar pair of photos, the
moon looks almost the same at each position. In the
actual night sky, the moon looks enormous at the
horizon. One explanation is size comparison. When you
see the moon low in the sky, it seems large compared to
the tiny buildings or trees you see at the horizon. When
you see the moon high in the sky, it appears small
compared to the vast, featureless sky (Baird, 1982;
Restle, 1970). A second explanation is that the terrain
between the viewer and the horizon gives an impression
of great distance. When the moon is high in the sky, we
have no basis to judge distance, and we unconsciously
see the overhead moon as closer. Because we see the
horizon moon as more distant, we perceive it as larger
(Kaufman & Rock, 1989; Rock & Kaufman, 1962). This
explanation is appealing because it relates the moon
illusion to perception of distance, a factor already
accepted as important for other illusions. Many
psychologists are not satisfied with this explanation,
however, because they are not convinced that the
horizon moon looks farther away than the overhead
moon. If we ask which looks farther away, many people
say they are not sure. If we insist on an answer, most say
the horizon moon looks closer, contradicting the theory.
Some psychologists reply that the situation is
complicated: We unconsciously perceive the horizon as
farther away. Consequently, we perceive the horizon
moon as very large. Then, because of the perceived
large size of the horizon moon, we consciously say it
looks closer, while continuing unconsciously to perceive
it as farther (Rock & Kaufman, 1962). Studies of optical
illusions confirm what other phenomena already
indicated: What we perceive is not the same as what is
“out there.” Our visual system does an amazing job of
providing us with useful information about the world
around us, but under unusual circumstances, we have
distorted perceptions.
Making Sense of Sensory Information
you have probably heard the expression, “Seeing is
believing.” The saying is true in many ways, including
that what you believe influences what you see.
Perception is not just a matter of adding up the events
striking the retina. We look for what we expect to see,
we impose order on haphazard patterns, we see three
dimensions in two-dimensional drawings, and we see
optical illusions. The brain does not compute what light
is striking the retina but tries to learn what the objects
really are and what they are doing.
Subliminal perception. Under some circumstances, a
weak stimulus that we do not consciously identify
influences our behavior, at least briefly.
Feature detectors. In the first stages of the process of
perception, feature-detector neurons identify lines,
points, and simple movement. Visual aftereffects can be
interpreted in terms of fatiguing certain feature
detectors.
Perception of organized wholes. According to Gestalt
psychologists, we perceive an organized whole by
identifying patterns in a top-down manner.
Visual constancies. We ordinarily perceive the shape,
size, and color of objects as constant, even when the
pattern of light striking the retina varies.
Motion perception. We perceive an object as moving if
it moves relative to its background. We can distinguish
between an object that is actually moving and a similar
pattern of retinal stimulation that results from our own
movement.
Depth perception. To perceive depth, we use the
accommodation of the eye muscles and retinal disparity
between the views that our two eyes see. We also learn
to use several other cues that are just as effective with
one eye as with two.
Optical illusions. Some optical illusions occur because
we misperceive the relative distances of objects. We
perceive displays by comparing them to our previous
experiences with similar objects. convergence

Summary

Perception of minimal stimuli. No sharp dividing line

distinguishes sensory stimuli that can be perceived and
sensory stimuli that cannot be perceived.

Signal detection. To determine how accurately someone

detects a signal, we need to consider not only the ratio
of hits to misses when the stimulus is present but also
the ratio of false alarms to correct rejections when the
stimulus is absent.

Detecting rare stimuli. When people are trying to

detect some item, they are more likely to overlook it if it
occurs rarely.