Visual perception

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Sample objectives

What this unit covers

• Sensation, physical detection of stimuli using the senses.: Understanding sensation as the physical detection of stimuli through the senses.
• Sensation, physical detection of stimuli using the senses.: Recognizing perception as the interpretation and conscious experience of sensory information.
• Gibson’s direct theory of perception, including:: Gibson’s direct theory of perception covers: the bottom-up approach emphasizing the role of innate factors and sensory information for survival; the concept of optic flow, which describes how objects appear as the observer moves; motion parallax, where nearer objects seem to move more quickly than those further away; types of invariants in the environment that remain constant during movement, such as linear perspective and texture perspective; and affordance, which refers to the actions we perceive our environment to enable.
• Gibson’s direct theory of perception, including:: Support for Gibson’s direct theory of perception is provided by the visual cliff study conducted by Gibson and Walk.
• Gregory’s constructivist theory of perception, including:: Gregory’s constructivist theory of perception includes concepts such as top-down processing, the influence of the environment, schemas which are mental frameworks for organizing information, inferences drawn from sensory data, and perceptual hypotheses which are educated guesses made when interpreting sensory input.
• Gregory’s constructivist theory of perception, including:: Perceptual set refers to the tendency to notice certain elements of sensory information while overlooking others, influenced by existing schemas.
• Types of two-dimensional (2D) visual illusions:: Identify and describe various types of two-dimensional visual illusions, including ambiguous figures like Leeper’s lady illusion, fictions such as the Kanizsa triangle, distortions exemplified by the Müller-Lyer illusion, impossible figures like the Penrose triangle, and relative size illusions such as the Ebbinghaus illusion.
• Types of two-dimensional (2D) visual illusions:: Explain how Gestalt principles help in understanding visual illusions, particularly those involving ambiguous figures and fictions.