1. Psychology 2320 Cognitionand Perception: Thinking and Seeing Dr.Matthew Tata Department of PsychologyandNeuroscience University of Lethbridge

2. 1. Gain insight and knowledge into the functioning of the mind. 2. Learn to think critically and creatively about perplexing questions. 3. Discover weird and interesting things about perception and cognition. Objective

3. -Sensory Physiology -Hearing -Vision -Attention -Memory Perception Cognition The Plan

4. -Selected readings available at the bookstore -Sensation and Perception, Coran, Porac & Ward on reserve in library -Cognitive Psychology, Robinson- Riegler on reserve Text

5. Evaluation Mid-Term 1 15% Feb 7,8,9 Mid-Term 2 30% March 7,8,9 Final 45% April 19, 20, 21 Ideas Journal 10% Extra credit available through Psych Subject Pool Midterms and final are WebCT taken in the WebCT Test Centre Dates TBA pending confirmation from the testing centre

6. Ideas Journal Record your thoughts and questions about perception and cognition Keep track of your ideas - you never know when you’re going to have a good one! You will be graded on how good your ideas are!

7. A Good Idea: “the size of your eye has to be just right to match the focusing power of the cornea. How does the eye know when to stop growing? Is it because the brain tells it to stop when images are clearly focused? We could test this by looking at the size of the eyeballs in children who are born with cataracts since their brains don’t get accurate visual information from their eyes”

8. A Bad Idea: “Matt was wearing a blue sweater today. I like blue. Blue is my favorite color. I wish I had a blue sweater.”

9. Put Ideas in a Book

10. Grades Rounding will be down except when I decide otherwise!

11. Interaction My Office hours: immediately after class Your TAs are Karla Ponjavic and Matthew Bednarczyk Emails: matthew.tata@uleth.ca and karla.ponjavic@uleth.ca Karla will hold review sessions before and after exams Karla will also run “virtual”review sessions: –Email well-thought out, specific questions to her during the week. On Fridays, she will go through the questions, compile answers and send them out to the entire class (anonymously of course).

12. Interaction Try to understand on your own FIRST!

13. Rules If your cell phone rings, I get to answer it. If you need to take a nap, take it.

14. If You Were in my Psych 1000 Lecture… There will be no Gorillas in this course…if you know what I mean.

15. Perception: It’s not as Easy as it Looks

16. Purpose of this Lecture: See cool illusions Notice (and begin thinking about) the mysteries of perception and cognition

17. What is an Illusion? When what you perceive is not what is really out there Visual Illusions happen in your visual system Optical illusions occur when the physical stimulus itself is distorted

18. What is an Illusion? Optical IllusionVisual Illusion

28. Size Constancy Big and small = near and far !? System adjusts size based on perceived distance

29. Ponzo Illusion:

30. Muller - Lyer Illusion

32. Kaniza Triangle

33. Illusory Contours Kaniza Triangle Neurons in higher levels of visual pathways “build” contours from information in lower levels

36. Apparent Motion Object disappears and reappears somewhere else Visual system “interpolates” motion in between

37. Frazer Spiral:

40. Who did you see?

41. The Necker Cube Reversible Figure

42. Impossible Staircase

43. Shepard Tone

44. Attention and Perception Your perception of a rich visual environment is an illusion! You actually are only aware of the small part of the scene that you are attending to

45. Attention and Perception Change Blindness: you can’t notice changes in a scene unless you attend to the location of the change

46. Attention and Perception

48. Illusions Are cool. Highlight questions about how perception happens. Make you think.

49. Next Time: A bit of philosophy and a bit of biology