Serial Conscious Processing Slower than parallel processing Allows us to solve new problems which require focus Volunteers?

Selective Attention Relate back to bias –Class experience: awareness of your nose, fingers, hands, feet, smells, sounds, sights – or are you just taking notes? Selective Attention: focusing conscious awareness on PARTICULAR stimulus

Selective Inattention vo

Selective Inattention Inattentional Blindness: failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere Change Blindness: failing to notice changes in the environment R2c

Other types of blindness Choice-blindness: people seldom notice deception and will in fact readily explain a wrong preference –Johansson experiment (2005) Choice-blindness blindness: people tend believe they have the ability to perceive deception when it occurs

Pop-out phenomenon When stimuli are so powerful and strikingly distinct, we don’t choose to attend to the stimuli, they draw our eye and demand our attention

Review Brain Games: Pay Attention Inattentional blindness –Failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere Change blindness –Failing to notice changes in the environment Choice blindness –People seldom notice deception, and will readily explain a wrong choice Choice-blindness blindness –When asked if they would notice deception in an experiment in which they were deceived, most insist they would In other words – it’s a blindness of their blindness

Unit 4: Sensation and Perception Sensations: take stimuli in Perception: what we do with it Psychophysics: study of relationship between physical characteristics of stimuli and our psychological experience of them

Thresholds Absolute threshold – try a riddle? –Gustav Fechner Signal detection theory –Totally depends on you and your experience –Think of airport security baggage screeners Subliminal –Literally “below threshold” –Is it legit? Yes – how does absolute threshold explain it? –Can advertisers use it to persuade us? No – explain using the word fleeting –What is the end result? Much of our information occurs automatically, out of sight, off the radar screen of our conscious mind –Priming? Difference threshold –Also called just noticeable difference (JND) –Detectable difference increases with size of stimulus –Weber’s law (proportion – not amount) Sensory adaptation –Why does your fart only smell for a little bit? –Darting eyes

Vision The eye receives light waves and converts energy into neural impulses by a process called Transduction.

The Process Light energy hits the rod or cone which creates a photochemical reaction Photochemical reaction creates an electrical impulse sent to bipolar cells, which funnel the electricity to ganglion cells Ganglion cells, whose combined axons create the Optic Nerve, which leads to the brain. The spot where the Optic nerve leaves the eye is a blind spot.

Where feature detectors detect.

Visual Processing Feature detectors: –Separate neurons/neural networks in the brain –sensitive to specific stimuli, angles, lines, edges, shapes or movements –allowing brain to differentiate individual objects or movements to concentrate on.

Wavelength = hue Amplitude = brightness

Problems If the lens or cornea is distorted in relation to the eye then it affects the acuity or sharpness of the image seen. One is said to be either nearsighted or farsighted when this occurs.