• Perception’s nature:
  • rapid, effortless
  • adaptive
  • selective
  • based on patterns
  • dynamic
  • involves reasoning
• There is:
  • bottom-up: starting from stimulus, assembling sensory information. Data driven
  • top-down: perception from prior knowledge, using models. Theory driven
• Bottom up:
  • Feature detectors first step
  • Recognition By Components theory
  • geons: perceptual building blocks
• Top-down:
  • Where’s Waldo
  • Higher-level brain primes lower level for patterns
• Perceptual constancy: size and shape:
  • Small person is person far away
  • door is door in any position
  • teacup oval at angle is actually circle
• Timbre constancy
• Psychophysics:
  • Psychometric function: formula relating subjective experience to prop of physical stimulus.
  • Laws basics: amount of stimulus needed to notice a change depends on what you already have
  • Just Noticeable Difference: Weber’s Law. \(\frac{\Delta I}{I} = k\)
  • Helmholtz’s theory of unconscious inference
• Gestalt theory: whole is something else than the sum of its parts:
  • pragnanz: perceive and interpret ambiguous/complex in simplest form
  • Filling in the gaps
  • Figure-ground: what we see as figure (obj), and what we perceive as ground (context)
  • These are heuristics
• Experience-Dependent Plasticity
• Mirror neurons
• Musicians vs non-musicians listening to music