Perception & Thinking

PERCEPTION &
THINKING
Perception
Any living organism must solve an unending series of
problems presented to it by the environment within which
it dwells. The complexity of the problems and associated
sophistication of the solutions depend on the nature and
complexity of the organism.
The study of perception deals with the question of how organisms
process and organize incoming raw sensory information in order
to:
(1) form a coherent representation or model of the world within
which the organism dwells
(2) use that representation to solve naturally occurring problems,
such as navigating, grasping, and planning.
Functions of perception
Five major functions of the perceptual system are:
(1) determining which part of the sensory environment to attend to.
(2) localizing, or determining where objects are.
(3) recognizing, or determining what objects are.
(4) abstracting the critical information from objects.
(5) keeping the appearance of objects constant, even though their retinal
images are changing. Another area of study is how our perceptual capacities
develop.
Attention:
Attention is best thought of as involving multiple interacting processes. One is

responsible for keeping us alert. For example, an air-traffic controller needs to
remain alert in order to remain aware of the various aircraft that she is
responsible for; failure of this system might lead to a disastrous attentional
lapse. A second system is responsible for orienting processing resources to
task-relevant information (e.g., focusing on the voice so that we can
understand what is being said), and the third, sometimes referred to as the
‘executive’, decides whether we want to continue attending to the information
or instead switch attention to other information (e.g., ‘This person is talking
about fashion – I have no interest in fashion’).
Selective attention is the process by which we select some stimuli for further
processing while ignoring others. In vision, the primary means of directing our
attention are eye movements. Most eye fixations are on the more informative,
i.e., unusual, parts of a scene. Selective attention also occurs in audition.
Usually we are able to selectively listen by using cues such as the direction
from which the sound is coming and the voice characteristics of the speaker.
For the most part, we can only remember what we attend to. Our ability to
selectively attend is mediated by processes that occur in the early stages of
recognition as well as by processes that occur only after the message’s
meaning has been determined. By not attending to – i.e., ignoring – large
parts of the environment, we lose the ability to remember much about those
parts of the environment. However, such selective attention pares down the
amount of necessary information processing to the point where it is
manageable by the brain.
Localization
To localize objects, we must first separate them and then organize them into
groups. Localization involves determining an object’s position in the up–down
and left–right dimensions. This is relatively easy because the required
information is part of our retinal image.
Localizing an object also requires that we know its distance from us. This form
of perception, known as depth perception, is not so easy because it’s not
available in the retinal image. We have a variety of depth cues, both
monocular and binocular, that allow us to do this. Localizing an object
sometimes requires that we know the direction in which an object is moving.
Recognition
Recognizing an object requires that the various features associated with the object
(such as shapes and colors) be correctly bound together, a process that requires
attention. Recognition of a particular object is aided by first acquiring ‘global’ aspects
of the scene; for example quickly understanding that you are looking at a kitchen
helps recognizing an ambiguous object as a loaf of bread rather than a mailbox.
There are known kinds of cells in the visual cortex that are sensitive to various kinds
of stimulus features such as orientation and position within the visual field.
Face recognition may be special, i.e., different in important respects from recognition
of other objects.
Abstraction
Abstraction is the process of converting the raw sensory information acquired

by the sense organs (for example, patterns of straight and curved lines) into
abstract categories that are pre-stored in memory (for example, letters or
words).
Abstracted information takes less space and is therefore faster to work with
than raw information. A useful analogy is between a bitmapped computer
image of a face versus an abstracted image of the same face that is made up
of preformed structures such as ovals and lines
Perceptual constancy
Another major function of the perceptual system is to achieve perceptual

constancy – to keep the appearance of objects the same in spite of large
variations in the initial representations of the stimuli received by the sense
organs that are engendered by various environmental factors.
Color and brightness constancy entail perceiving the actual color and
brightness of a stimulus even when the actual information arriving at the eye
varies in color makeup (because of the color makeup of the ambient lighting)
and in brightness (because of the level of ambient illumination)
Size constancy entails perceiving the actual size of a stimulus even when the
actual size of the object’s image on the retina varies because of the object’s
distance. Intrinsically, constancies entail ‘illusion’ in the sense that by a
constancy’s very nature, perception differs systematically from the physical
nature of the stimulus. It logically follows, and is empirically true that many
visual illusions may be explained by the various constancies. Constancies
occur in all sensory modalities.
Various kinds of perceptual illusions can be explained by the perceptual
system’s insistence on maintaining constancies. Although visual constancies
are the most salient, constancies exist in all sensory modalities.
LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT
Language is structured at three different levels:
(1) sentence units (2) words and parts of words that carry meaning, and (3) speech sounds.
The three levels of language are interconnected. Sentence units are built from words (and
parts of words), and words are constructed from speech sounds.
A phoneme is a category of speech sounds. Every language has its own set of phonemes –
with different sets for different languages – and rules for combining them into words.
A morpheme is the smallest unit of language that carries meaning. Most morphemes are
words, but others are prefixes and suffixes that are added to words. Syntactic rules are used
for combining words into phrases and phrases into sentences.
The areas of the brain that mediate language lie in the left hemisphere and include Broca’s
area and Wernicke’s area
The development of language:
Infants appear to be preprogrammed to learn phonemes, but they need

several years to learn the rules for combining them. l When children begin to
speak, they first learn words that name concepts that are familiar in their
environment. Then they move on to sentences. They begin with one-word
utterances, progress to two-word telegraphic speech, and then elaborate their
noun and verb phrases.
Children learn language in part by testing hypotheses (often unconsciously).
These hypotheses tend to be guided by a small set of operating principles,
which call the children’s attention to critical characteristics of utterances, such
as word endings.
Innate factors also play a major role in language acquisition. There are
numerous findings that support this claim. For one, all children in all cultures
seem to go through the same stages in acquiring their language. For another,
like other innate behaviors, some language abilities are learned only during a
critical period. This partly explains why it is relatively difficult to learn a
language later in life.
CONCEPTS AND CATEGORIZATION: THE
BUILDING BLOCKS OF THOUGHT
Thought occurs in both propositional and imaginal modes. The key
component of a proposition is a concept, the set of properties that we
associate with a class.
A concept includes both a prototype (properties that describe a best
example) and a core (properties that are most important for being a member
of the concept). Core properties play a major role in processing well-defined
concepts like ‘grandmother’, whereas prototype properties dominate in fuzzy
concepts like ‘bird’.
Children often learn a new concept by using an exemplar strategy: A novel
item is classified as an instance of a concept if it is sufficiently similar to a
known exemplar of the concept. As children grow older, they also use
hypothesis testing as a strategy for learning concepts. Different neural regions
may mediate different kinds of concepts. For example, perceptual regions of
the brain may be more involved in representing animals from artifacts,
whereas functional and motor regions of the brain may play a larger role in
representing artifacts than animals. Different neural regions may also be
involved in different categorization procedures
Reasoning
Deductive reasoning
According to logicians, the strongest arguments demonstrate deductive
validity, meaning that it is impossible for the conclusion of the argument to be
false if its premises are true. Consider the following example:
a If it’s raining, I’ll take an umbrella.
b It’s raining.
c Therefore, I’ll take an umbrella.
Inductive reasoning
Logical rules
Logicians have noted that an argument can be good even if it is not
deductively valid. Such arguments are inductively strong, meaning that the
conclusion is false if the premises are true.
An example of an inductively strong argument is as follows:
a. Mitch majored in accounting in college.
b. Mitch now works for an accounting firm.
c. Therefore, Mitch is an accountant.
This argument is not deductively valid (Mitch may have
tired of accounting courses and taken a night watchman’s
job). Inductive strength, then, is a matter of probabilities,
not certainties, and (according to logicians) inductive logic
should be based on the theory of probability.
THOUGHT IN ACTION: PROBLEM SOLVING
Problem solving requires breaking down a goal into subgoals that can be
obtained more easily. Strategies for breaking a goal into subgoals include
reducing differences between the current state and the goal state; means–
ends analysis (eliminating the most important differences between the
current and goal states), and working backward.
Some problems are easier to solve by using a visual representation, and
others can be more readily solved by using a propositional representation.
Numerous problems can be solved equally well by visual or propositional
representations.
Expert problem solvers differ from novices in four ways: They have more
representations to bring to bear on the problem, they represent novel
problems in terms of solution principles rather than surface features, they
form a plan before acting, and they tend to reason forward rather than
backward.
Thought processes that do not require effortful attention occur automatically
and without conscious control.

Perception & Thinking

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Perception & Thinking

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Perception & Thinking

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

PERCEPTION &

Attention is best thought of as involving multiple interacting processes. One is

Abstraction is the process of converting the raw sensory information acquired

Another major function of the perceptual system is to achieve perceptual

Infants appear to be preprogrammed to learn phonemes, but they need

You might also like