Perceptual Processing Chapter 4  Overview: Successful movement requires an awareness of the body and the environment.  This begins with the detection of information from the sensory receptors.

For Example:  What must be considered when preparing to hit an approaching tennis ball?

Roles of Perceptual Processes  1. Receive information from sensory organs.  2. Determine what information is important and what is not.  3. Send this information on for Decision-making.

Really important concepts.  In order to understand Perceptual Processes, we must understand two important concepts.  1. Sensation  2. Perception

More important stuff.  Sensation: stimulates sensory receptors which send impulses to the CNS. What happens there?  Perception: interprets the code.

Sensory Structures  1. Proprioceptors: A. Muscle Spindles B. Golgi Tendon Organs C. Ruffini Endings (corpuscles) D. Pacinian Corpuscles E. Vestibular receptors F. Cutaneous Receptors

Exteroreceptors  1. Vision: provides information about visual acuity, depth perception, tracking, color, etc.  2. Hearing or audition: needed to determine what is going on in the environment that vision may not pick up.

So what really happens when we process information?  1. Detecting information.  Let’s take the example from the text.  A baseball outfielder who says “I lost the ball in the crowd”. What really is the problem?  This leads us to the Signal Detection Theory

Signal Detection Theory  1. Signal Threshold  So how does this help our baseball outfielder?  How have manufacturers helped with this little problem?

The Next Step  Comparing information- making distinctions among similar categories of stimuli.  There must be a “just noticeable difference.”

Perceptual Standards  Perceptual standards are memory standards developed by practice and stored in memory.

Anticipation  Defined: a kind of ‘pre-processing’ of information before the onset of the stimulus –a form of prediction.

Three forms of anticipation.  1. Receptor Anticipation: monitoring an external stimulus and then estimating when and where it will appear in space.  Examples:

Effector Anticipation:  2. estimating how long a movement may take.  Examples:

Perceptual Anticipation:  3. requires the timing of events that take place in a sequence. This is the most sophisticated.  Example:  Involves a new theory called: coincident-timing.

Co-incident Timing  What is involved?  A. monitoring the stimulus  B. anticipating where and when  C. estimating the onset and timing of muscular actions  Example: