Perceptual psychology

> Perceptual psychology focuses on the study of perception, process by which individuals interpret and make sense of sensory information from the environment

Sensory Modalities:  vision, audition (hearing), touch, taste, and smell

Perceptual Processes: sensation (the detection of sensory stimuli) and perception (the interpretation and organization of sensory information)

Perceptual Illusions:  phenomena where sensory information is misinterpreted by the brain. These illusions reveal the complexities of perception and how it can be influenced by context and expectations.

Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down Processing

• How perception is shaped by both bottom-up (data-driven) and top-down (concept-driven) processing

• Bottom-up processing starts with sensory input

• Top-down processing involves using prior knowledge and expectations to interpret sensory information

Gestalt Principles  describe how humans tend to organize sensory information into meaningful patterns and wholes (proximity, similarity, closure and continuity)

Depth Perception

• The field explores how individuals perceive depth and three-dimensional space

• Researchers study cues such as binocular disparity (the difference between the images seen by each eye) and monocular cues (cues that can be perceived with one eye) to understand depth perception

Applied Perceptual Psychology  

• Applications in fields like advertising, design, and human factors engineering

• Understanding how people perceive information helps create more effective and user-friendly products and environments

Multisensory Integration

• Researchers explore how the brain integrates information from multiple sensory modalities. For instance, how sight and sound are combined in our perception of a movie or how taste and smell interact in flavor perception

• For instance, studies on synesthesia, a condition where one sensory experience triggers another (e.g., seeing colors when hearing music)

Change Blindness

• Phenomenon where people often fail to notice substantial changes in their visual field when those changes occur gradually or during an interruption, like a brief eye movement (example. character changing colour of shirt in movie, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkrrVozZR2c)

• This phenomenon highlights the limitations of our attention and the selective nature of perception

• Selective Attention: Our brains have limited capacity for attention, which means we filter out some information and focus on what's most relevant at the moment

Inattentional Blindness

• An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY

• Occurs when individuals fail to perceive an unexpected object or event in their visual field because their attention is focused elsewhere

The McGurk Effect

• How our perception of speech sounds can be influenced by visual cues

• When individuals see a person saying one sound while hearing another, they often perceive a third sound

Phantom Limb Sensation

• Individuals who have lost a limb due to amputation sometimes experience the sensation that the missing limb is still present

• This phenomenon highlights the role of the brain in generating perceptions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTaVWB-yOo4)

Pareidolia

• Tendency to perceive familiar shapes or patterns in unrelated or random stimuli

• This phenomenon explains why people often see faces in clouds, animals in constellations, or objects in abstract art

Color Constancy: phenomenon where we perceive the color of an object as relatively consistent under varying lighting conditions

Baader-Meinhof phenomenon

• Known as frequency illusion or recency illusion

• Occurs when the thing you have just noticed, experienced or been told about suddenly appears everywhere constantly

•  Example:
  You just bought a new shirt and suddenly you notice many other people at school/college wearing it
  You were just telling your friends about new song you found on YouTube and suddenly you notice it playing in coffee shops or someone is talking about it

• Explanation: your brain seems to be excited by the fact that you have learned something new, selective attention occurs and you start noticing it more

*We have to keep in mind that everybody is different and that there are many different visual states and difficulties person can have

*Vision is also something subjective and can be influenced by culture, age, expiriences, expectations and attention

*often in labaratory settings, not always replicable in real life situations

The Visual Cliff Experiment 

• Conducted by Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk in the 1960s

• Experiment examined depth perception in infants

• It involved a "visual cliff" apparatus to test whether infants would show a fear response when perceiving a drop-off, providing insights into the development of depth perception in early life

The Cocktail Party Effect

• Phenomenon where you can focus your attention on one conversation at a noisy party 

• Your brain automatically filters out other conversations but can quickly switch focus if someone mentions your name

The Tetris Effect 

• After playing a game for an extended period, you may start seeing patterns from the game in your everyday life

• It can occur with other activities too

The Rubber Hand Illusion: 

• Involves tricking the brain into feeling sensations in a rubber hand placed next to the person's real hand

•  It reveals the brain's ability to adapt to sensory input