In a situation where there is a confrontation about a given topic the most important weapon a person has is their credible and reliable arguments. Within a psychology conference, a speaker stated that the way people perceive a scene is an objective and accurate representation of the outside world. According to adequate concepts within the psychology field, the speaker’s statement is deemed incorrect. A concept such as the McGurk effect disapproves the idea that people’s perception of the world is accurate. The McGurk effect occurs when there is a false interpretation of what we hear and see. For example, when a person pronounces the sound “ba” in a certain way with their lips people hear it as “ba”. Although when the person moves their lips differently when pronouncing “ba” the sound for some is then interpreted as “fa”. The lips are moving to the word “fa” but in reality, the person is still vocalizing “ba”. This happens because in many situations vision dominates what is being seen and heard. Thus, the representation of the scene is incorrectly interpreted because in reality the same sound is being pronounced in both scenarios. …show more content…
During change blindness, if a scene changes and a person is not attending to it they will not notice the changes. For example, if a person pulls up at the drive-through at McDonald’s, suddenly someone screams in the back, the driver will turn back to see who screamed and when they turn back towards the window they might not notice that a different person is serving. This occurs due to the driver not paying attention to the scene and when it changes there is momentary blindness. In addition, this concept is related to top-down processing because the context stays the same while target object changes. Therefore, this disapproves the proposal that what we see is a correct portrayal of the
A video is put on, and in the beginning of this video your told to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball. By the time the scene is over, most of the people watching the video have a number in their head. What these people missed was the gorilla walking through as they were so focused on counting the number of passes between the white team. Would you have noticed the gorilla? According to Cathy Davidson this is called attention blindness. As said by Davidson, "Attention blindness is the key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves (Davidson, 2011, pg.4)." Davidson served as the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University helping to create the Program in Science and Information Studies and the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She also holds highly distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has written a dozen different books. By the end of the introduction Davidson poses five different questions to the general population. Davidson's questions include, "Where do our patterns of attention come from? How can what we know about attention help us change how we teach and learn? How can the science of attention alter our ideas about how we test and what we measure? How can we work better with others with different skills and expertise in order to see what we're missing in a complicated and interdependent world? How does attention change as we age, and how can understanding the science of attention actually help us along the way? (Davidson, 2011, p.19-20)." Although Davidson hits many good points in Now You See It, overall the book isn't valid. She doesn't exactly provide answers ...
One wonders what takes place in the brain to cause such phenomenal differences in perception. The cause is unknown for certain, like many things in the realm of science it has not been researched nearly enough, but there are some indications.
Classical theories demonstrating the inattentional blindness paradigm are (1) the perceptual load, (2) inattentional amnesia and (3) expectation.
In “The Anatomy of Judgmen”t, M. L. J. Abercrombie discusses how information is gained through our perception. Abercrombie claims that interpretation is a very complicated task that people have been learning to exercise since birth. Each person has a different way of interpreting the objects or situations they see, because people often relate their own past experiences. She also explains two important concepts: schemata and context. She defines schemata as a way our mind functions by understanding new things perceived through sight, by relating it to an individual’s past experiences. Past experiences help interpret what is seen further, if the object fits one’s expectation or their schemata, and not something different from their past experiences. Her fundamental insight is that seeing is more complex than just passively registering what is seen, and consists of a form judgment for...
Research Demonstration: The False Consensus Effect In science, we emphasize systematic, careful observation as a key to overcoming the limits of other methods of acquiring knowledge. That is, we trust systematic observation more than we trust our own intuition. We can actually investigate this issue. The following description provides you with the details necessary to conduct a simple study to investigate the accuracy of human intuition. We often believe that others are more like ourselves than they really are.
In Stephen Jay Gould’s essay, “Some close encounters of a mental kind,” Gould discussed about how certainty can be both blessing and dangerous. According to Gould, certainty can be blessing because it can provide warmth, comfort and secure. However, it can also be a danger because it can trick our mind with false information of what we see and remember in our mind. Gould also talked about the three levels of possible error in direct visual observation: misperception, retention and retrieval. According to Gould, our human mind is the greatest miracle of nature and the wicked of all frauds and tricksters mixed. To support his argument and statements, he used an example of an experiment that Elizabeth Loftus, a professor from University of California Irvine, did to her students and a personal experience of his childhood trip to the Devils Tower. I agree with Gould that sight and memory do not provide certainty because what we remember is not always true, our mind can be tricky and trick us into believing what we see/hear is real due to the three potential error of visual observation. Certainty is unreliable and tricky.
The term psychology has many meanings to different people, even to those who work within the psychological field. The word psychology derives from two Greek roots; 'psyche' refers to 'soul' or 'mind' and logo refers to 'the study of'. A more update definition of the word psychology can be found from Atkinson, et al (1991) “The scientific study of behaviours and mental processes.” However on Google Definitions the definition of psychology is “the mental characteristics and attitudes of a person” [accessed 16 September 2011], which gives somewhat of a contradiction. In this assignment I will be outlining and evaluating four key psychological perspectives. The psychological perspectives I have chosen are the behavioural approach, biological approach, cognitive approach and the psychodynamic approach.
Person P is unable to recognize the difference in the aircraft and the surface of the aircraft. This shows that we see objects mediately through seeing their surface immediately. This seems to be true, but when knowing that we see an object in virtue of seeing their surface still leaves us in the same position that STm is in. Our perceptual view is still worse than when we directly see an object and shows that most, if not all, objects are viewed mediately.
Our attention is very selective when it comes to getting information from our environment. We could be looking at everything within our environment and miss changes that occur while looking. According to Rensink, O’Regan and Clark (1997), attention is a key factor, meaning when our attention is focused on the area of change then change can be detected. When we fail to detect change, it can result in change blindness. In support of this idea, Simons and Levin (1998) suggest that change blindness occurs if there is a lack of “precise” visual representation of their surroundings. In other words, a person can be looking at an object and not fully notice a change.
Psychology is the scientific study of the mind, brain, and behavior. In psychology, and all of the other sciences, relying on opinions is abandoned in order to find out which explanations best fit the evidence or data given. Science continually forces us to question our findings and conclusions. Over time, psychology has advanced greatly and a main reason for such progressiveness is because of the change in the research model used.
Slife, B., Ed. (1998). Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Psychological Issues, 10th ed. (pp.329-350). Gui
Perception is a manner of selecting, organizing, and interpreting people, objects, events, situations, and or activities. The movie “Inside Out” is a perfect example of how perception affects our communication; it shows exactly how the process of selection, organization, and interpretation correlated to each other.
Hergenhahn, B.R. (2009). Social and Theoretical Psychology: Conceptual and Historical Issues 1. An introduction to the History of Psychology. 1 (1), p1-28.
The way that each individual interprets, retrieves, and responds to the information in the world that surrounds you is known as perception. It is a personal way of creating opinions about others and ourselves in everyday life and being able to recognize it under various conditions. Each person’s perceptions are used as a kind of filter that every piece of information has to pass through before it determines the effect that it has or will have on the person from the stimulus. It is convincing to believe that we create multiple perceptions about different situations and objects each day. Perceptions reflect our opinions in many ways. The quality of a person’s perceptions is very important and can affect the response that is given through different situations. Perception is often deceived as reality. “Through perception, people process information inputs into responses involving feelings and action.” (Schermerhorn, et al.; p. 3). Perception can be influenced by a person’s personality, values, or experiences which, in turn, can play little role in reality. People make sense of the world that they perceive because the visual system makes practical explanations of the information that the eyes pick up.
The social psychology phenomenon that I have chosen is the spotlight effect. The spotlight effect is the belief that others are paying more attention to one's appearance and behavior than they really are (Myers, 2013). This phenomenon occurs more in adolescence and in situations such as public speaking or if a person has a change in appearance (i.e. a blemish or a “bad” haircut). The spotlight effect particularly interests me because I have experienced this phenomenon and I have seen many of my friends and family members experience it as well. I feel that it is fascinating that people feel that others are paying more attention to them than they actually are and that we see ourselves as center stage (Myers, 2013).