Psychology Exam 2

What are top-down and bottom-up processing? What are sensation and perception?

-sensation: how we detect physical energy from the environment and encode it in neural signals -----pattern recognition: broken down into elementary features -perception: how we select, organize and interpret information -----TOP DOWN PROCESSING

What are: feature detectors, feature analysis, and pattern recognition?

Feature detectors: -----detectors are neurons that respond to specific features of a pattern. they get exhausted easily and we begin not reading over every letter or word in a sentence (the the)

What is subliminal stimulation? Can people be influenced by subliminal stimuli (what can and what cannot be influenced)? What is the absolute threshold?

Is there a message to perceive? -absolute threshold-detecting something reliably -subliminal stimuli: when stimuli are below one's absolute threshold for conscious awareness (we don't detect presence 50% of the time) -subliminal messages somehow bypass normal defense reactions -do NOT influence our behavior -priming effects of subliminal messages can influence judgments -we process facial expressions more quickly (subconsciously)

What is transduction? How does attention influence perception? What are inattentional blindness and change blindness?

Transduction: sensory information from the environment is converted to neural signals Inattention Blindness: most people think they simply see what is there. They fail to perceive things even when the image is in our retinas -inability to detect change (assumptions influence perception) -we don't expect to see changes -attention doesn't guarantee perception of visual stimulus -expectation influences both attention and perception

prosopagnosia defintion

cannot recognize faces due to perception disconnect