Perception and Attention Essay

The human brain is capable of perceiving and interpreting information or stimuli received through the sense organs (i.e., eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin) (Weiten, 1998). This ability to perceive and interpret stimulus allows the human being to make meaningful sense of the world and environment around them. However, even as the human being is able to perceive and interpret stimuli information through all sense organs, stimuli is most often or primarily interpreted using the visual (eyes) and auditory (ears) sense organs (Anderson, 2009). However, for the purpose of this paper, the visual information process will be examined.

Attention is thought to be selective-focused on one subject at a time. Traditionally, it has been assumed that automatic processing is involuntary, it does not require attention, and is relatively fast; whereas, controlled processing is voluntary, does require attention, and is relatively slow. We can conclude from this that the more we repeat a certain material or tasks the more it becomes automatic and effortless to us.

Visual attention is the collective title given to the cognitive mechanisms that allow us to attend some visual stimuli over others, improving processing efficiency (McMains & Kastner, 2009). Here only covert visual attention, i.e. attention without head or eye-movement, will be considered. This is appropriate, since it seems that the primary purpose of eye-movements is to enhance visual acuity (Posner, 1980, p.9), which is not necessary for simple target detection required by the present study. There is a debate concerning the type of information that covert visual attention operates on, specifically if attention is deployed to specific areas in space or to perceptual objects.

ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to defend a broad concept of visual perception, according to which it is a sufficient condition for visual perception that subjects receive visual information in a way which enables them to give reliably correct answers about the objects presented to them. According to this view, blindsight, non-epistemic seeing, and conscious visual experience count as proper types of visual perception. This leads to two consequences concerning the role of the phenomenal qualities of visual experiences. First, phenomenal qualities are not necessary in order to see something, because in the case of blindsight, subjects can see objects without experiences phenomenal

The current experiment is being run to investigate whether the global superiority effect is affected by the type of symbol, using a divided attention task. In previous studies Navon (1977), cited in Ness et al. (2014), used global letters made up of local letters to test how we process visual information. However, Yovel’s (2001), cited in Ness et al. (2014), divided attention task had two parts. Firstly, to see whether participants would react more quickly to global than local letters; and secondly, that there would be no difference to global and local target letters if the local letters were larger. In the current experiment the stimuli were global shapes and letters made up of local shapes and letters. They were tested to see the impact on processing and response times. The key features of the design was a 2x2 repeated measures design, and the participants performed on all four conditions which were two (IV’S) each with two levels.

The visual perception field is a very old are of study in psychological research. From ancient Greece to modern day scholars, philospher and psychologists have been studying on visual perception for centruries. As a result of people studying visual perception for such a lengthy amount of time, ground breaking researches have been conducted by many observers like Emil Emmert. In1881 it was found by Emil Emmert that an objects size afterimage seems to vary in size based on whether it is positioned close or farther away. When near by the object looks small. And the farther away it gets, the size of the object becomes noticeably larger. It’s perceived size is thought to be fixed on the retina and as it increases the perceived distance is also thought to increase consecutively. This

When an individual is focusing their attention on a particular object, the surrounding details are not processed in detail. There are several forms of attention, divided attention, selective attention, dichotic listening, stroop task, visual searches, and saccadic eye movement (Matlin, 2013).

This discussion is all about perception and how we look at things. Everyday we use our senses to improve our ability to see, hear, and become aware of something either good or bad. You can also use perception as a way of regarding, understanding, or interpreting something as well. During the watching of this video, there are some key points your wanting to know and understand.

Vision is the most important sensory compared to other sensory modality therefore there is a wide range of research carried out on vision. Visual attention is defined as a term that portrays how individuals are able to change their view while attending to an image that is of a normal perspective due to the neurones in the cortex (Carasco, 2011). It is often described as a focal point which is situated with different locations in the region of space (Wright, 1998). Visual search requires detecting a specific target as quickly as possible. For example, trying to find your car in a large car park. By focusing our attention to the specific environment it improves our visual search of the target (Keane et al., 2015). The speed of a visual search

The human brain has a limited capacity to deal with the incoming information but yet every moment we encounter a large variety of stimuli like sights, sounds and smells. However, as mentioned above if we encounter stimuli which conflict with our schemas, we reconstruct our memory in order to fit our schemas. The human brain therefore focuses on some aspects of the situation while ignoring the others in order to cope with the sensory barrage. This process of choosing stimuli is called selective attention. Eyewitnesses tend to collect information that relates to their interests and may ignore other vital aspects

Golemen (2015) defines the “subtle faculty” is defined as the ability of human beings to focus their attention on a particular person, place, or thing, which is a gauge of the success or failure in life. In this manner, the mental focus of human beings is the ability of the individual to succeed at maintaining the longest and most acute form of attention span over time: “”Our very nimbleness in life depends on this subtle faculty” (Goleman 2). Goleman (2015) is expressly arguing that the “focus” is one of the most important mental functions in the human mind. In fact, the ability of an individual to focus is part of a broader relationship with the memory, comprehension skills, and other aspects of daily cognition that are essential for human survival. This aspect of human thought is an underrated and often ignored facet of psychology: “Though it matters enormously for how we navigate life, attention in

This definition emphasises how attention is thought of as a selective process. It seems clear from common sense that we cannot attend to all stimuli at once, so some kind of selection must take place as to what information we attend to and process further, and what is disregarded.

Research carried out on attention has mainly been associated with the selective processing of incoming sensory information. It proposes, to some degree, our awareness of the world depends on what we choose to focus on and not simply the stimulation received by our senses. Attention is often linked to a filter that screens out most potential stimuli whilst allowing a select few to pass through into our conscious awareness, however, a great deal of debate has been devoted to where the filter is situated in the information processing chain (Martindale, 1991). Psychologists have made extensive contributions to this subject matter in the past century. Notable examples include Donald Broadbent's filter theory of attention (1958), which set the

The perceptual system is comprised of a of a diverse range of senses including visual, auditory, olfactory and tactition; the perceptual system is part of the nervous system, which contains millions of nerve cells called receptors that sense and respond to a plethora of sensory stimuli including light, sound and temperature. The act of perceiving rather than merely sensing enables us to analyse and make sense of incoming sensory information, allowing us to construct a description of the environment to inform and guide our actions within a complex, dynamic world.