Lecture one
What is perception? * Largely unconscious, automatic process, based on unavailable neural events, together with unconscious inferences from specific cues. * Cognitive, implicit * Can require conscious effort to interpret sensory data when things are not clear * Ambiguous, incomplete * Perception is a complex nervous system operation * Perception starts with an environmental stimulus acting on a stimulus receptor. Understanding it turns it into electricity. Via transduction the information is transmitted to the brain where it is processed. Processing leads to perception where recognition comes into play. * Perception is a three step process: * Stimulus (environmental, attended, receptors) electricity (transduction, transmissions, processing) experience and action (perception, recognition, action) * Perception recognition action * Transduction (turning light energy to chemical energy) transmission (between neurons) processing (neurons and brain making sense) * Perception relies upon two interacting processes * Bottom-up processing: * Processing based on incoming stimuli from the environment * DATA-BASED PROCESSING * Top-down processing: * Processing based on the perceiver’s previous experience * KNOWLEDGE-BASED PROCESSING * i.e. rat-man illusion
Approaches to studying perception: * There are three approaches to studying perception and they involve observing perceptual processes at different stages in the system * Psychophysical Approach (PP): the stimulus-perception relationship * The stimulus is physical and perception is psychological * PP = interaction between ‘stimuli’ and ‘experience and action’ * Physiological Approach (PH1): the stimulus-physiology relationship * PH1 = interaction between ‘stimuli’ and ‘physiological