Reading Activity Week #4 (Due Monday)

Chapter 3

1a)
The topic of psychophysics and illusions was interesting to me. I was able to relate these topics to my own life experiences.
1b)
Illusions are caused by expectations from our past experiences and occur when one’s perception of reality is actually different from reality. Psychophysics looks at the relationship between physical changes of the world and the psychological experiences linked to these changes. This is interesting because everyone may perceive things differently. Illusions provide insight into how each individual’s perceptual system works. For example, whether we perceive an object close to us as being the same size as the same object that is far away from us may be interrupted different among people.
2a)
The next topic I found interesting was perceptual span and its relation to memory.
2b)
Perceptual span determines how much we can experience from a brief exposure. This interests me as it looks at our short-term memory and what our brains are able to store. Humans use their senses to recall something. For example, it is interesting when we hear a familiar song on the radio for only a brief moment and it soon fades from our memory, but then an hour later we are able to recall that same song in our head. It is fascinating what our perceptual span can do and how our memory allows us to recall things from moments before.
3a)
Another topic from chapter three that I found interesting was the topic of attention and its relation to our levels of consciousness.
3b)
Attention is when we are concentrating on sensory or mental events. I found the issues with attention and our consciousness to be interesting. Humans are selective as to what they are processing because it is difficult for our mind to process everything. We also control what we are reacting to as some times our minds are automatically processing information that does not require our conscious awareness. For example, it may require little conscious to drive to work on the same route every day and therefore, requires little attention. It is interesting what our minds choose to bring our attention to and what things we choose to complete without full consciousness.
4a)
The one thing I found the least interesting was the information on our vision.
4b)
Although our vision is one of our senses that provides the most critical information about our environment, I have read a lot in previous classes about our cornea and lens, retina, and the cones and rods making up the sensory system of our eyes. I have also learned a lot about color blindness. With prior knowledge of this information, I find this least interesting to read about.
5)
The information I read about cognitive neuroscience of attention will be most useful in understanding Cognitive Psychology. The neuroscience of attention discusses where and how our brain processes stimuli and why individuals choose to be selective in their perceiving of information. Cognitive Psychology is most certainly concerned with the ideas of perception, sensations, and memories. The understanding of attention and the human brain will build on our class discussions of Cognitive Psychology.
6)
Chapter three builds on the previous chapters as we look deeper at the brain functioning. From chapter two, we learned about the different regions of the brain. This chapter, however, looked more at how and why we function information in the ways we do and how our attention and memory affects our brain information processing.
7a)
I would like to learn more about selective attention and the different models of selective attention.
7b)
I would like to better understand why we select certain information to process in our brain. I want to learn more about the single-channel theory and the multiple-channel theory and how these theories restrict our information processing by channel capacity. I am curious to know if it is certain stimuli that cause us to process certain information first during a group conversation and if this relates to our senses.
8)
While reading this chapter I was focusing a lot on our sensations. I feel as if our sensations leads us to remember certain things or pay attention to certain things over other items. Our vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch allow us to experience things at a much deeper level. Our senses relate to whether we are going to remember a past experience and place that experience in our short-term memory. They also may cause us to have a higher level conscious of attention to an experience if more of our senses are involved in that experience.
9)
Psychophysics, illusions, perceptual system, reality, perceptual span, memory, senses, attention, consciousness, selective attention, vision, cornea, lens, cones, rods, retina, color blindness, single-channel theory, multiple-channel theory, stimuli, sensations, and short-term memory

1a&b) One concept I found interesting is the Cocktail Party Phenomenon. I particularly was interested in this because it happens to me on an everyday basis. This phenomenon refers to the intrusion of an interesting event that gain’s your attention. The text uses the example of if you are in a conversation and hear a trigger word, like your name, in another conversation you are immediately paying attention to that other conversation even though you weren’t originally listening to it at all. I know this happens to me a lot. I will be speaking with one person but I get distracted a lot, especially if I am already interested in another conversation. I think this was just interesting because I didn’t realize there was a definition to that behavior and I didn’t realize how complex our auditory system is.

2a&b) The second topic I found interesting was the section on illusions. I particularly love illusions and tricking my eyes and brain into seeing or not seeing things. It is interesting to me that our perceptions don’t always match reality and that’s why many illusions are known as perceptual illusions. I remember as a little kid going to my grandma’s house and she would always have these optical illusions on her fridge. I used to pride myself in being able to see past the illusion to the real thing. In fact, I absolutely love taking any tests or doing any activities that are meant to confuse my brain and forcing my brain to get it right. Even more so than the Muller-Lyer illusion, I enjoy the tests where they have a paragraph of writing and they scramble the letters or drastically alter the words and you still have to make sense of it.

3a&b) The third topic I thought was interesting was the Sensory-Brain Disposition section. I enjoyed learning more specifically about what occurs when you “see stars.” I had never really known the reason for this and I have seen stars anywhere from just getting up too quickly to getting hit in the head during a rugby match. The text says that by being hit in the back of the head, or the occipital lobe, you will have the sensation of seeing stars. It doesn’t go into much of an explanation of other reasons why we might be seeing stars. I think it is an interesting subject because our eyes aren’t actually seeing these bright flashes. That seems so strange to me and it is definitely something that I would be interested in learning more about.

4a&b) I think I found the vision section to be the least interesting just because it is pretty basic and I have learned it multiple times. I have a pretty good understanding of how complex and amazing our visual system is and while I do find that interesting I just don’t think it’s as interesting as some of the other topics I read about. I have found that I do like to learn about our biological functions but I prefer to learn about the more specific cognitive topics that really involve areas of our brain, such as illusions.

5) I think this chapter gave me a better understanding of how our five senses are wired to work in our brains. But I think that the section over memory and attention might be very important in understanding cognitive psychology because they play such an instrumental role in how our brains function. If we had no memory we would not be able to have any higher order functions. And if we didn’t pay attention I don’t think we would have a lot to remember. When I think of cognitive psychology I think of the brain, its functions, and also of memory and how our brains take in, store, and use the information it collects.

6) This chapter expanded on psychophysics which was introduced in the first chapter as well as goes into more detail about different sections of our brains and their functions. In the last chapter we discussed the Central Nervous System and in this chapter we dig deeper into the Peripheral Nervous System.

7a&b) I am interested in either learning more about the process of “seeing stars” or in the topic of illusions and what part of our brains specifically help in understanding illusions. Both of these topics are very interesting to me because I really enjoy messing with my brain and trying to trick it and illusions definitely are able to do that. I also am very interested in getting a better understanding of the process of “seeing stars” because it happens to me so much and most of the time I have no idea why.

8) I thought a lot about how complex our sensory systems are and I also kept thinking about what it would be like if you lost the ability to see, hear, or smell. Their functions seem so central to our brain and its functions that I can’t imagine losing that whole section of sensory. It gave me a new respect for blind people because the text specifically says that vision is the most important sense because it provides the most critical information.

9) Terminology: Cocktail Party Phenomenon, auditory system, perceptual illusions, Muller-Lyer illusion, optical illusion, Sensory-Brain Disposition, seeing stars, visual system, cognitive psychology, higher order functions, memory, attention, Central nervous system, Peripheral nervous system

1)
One thing that I found interesting was looking at sensation and perception. I thought that this was particularly interesting because throughout our daily lives we are often stuck between the physical world and the mental world. The physical world is the sensation that is detected from energy where as perception is where our mental status of a situation. Sensation often refers to a direct stimuli where perception is a interpretation of the things that we sense. Without sensation and perception we would not know anything about the knowledge and the experiences that we have and how each of them relate to our relation to our knowledge of events that go on in the world.

2)
The second thing that I found interesting was vision. I particularly thought that this was interesting because vision is a large part of our everyday life. But what most people don't know is that vision is actually a complex process of life and without it we would not be able to see. Vision is a complex as there are many parts that are used to make the eye work properly. The cornea and lens is used to focuses on the images on the retina, if one of these are damaged then we will not be able to focus on a particular image. The human eye has about 7 million cones which are sensitive to the stimuli and about 125 million rods which are sensitive to poorly illuminated stimuli.

3)

The third thing that I found interesting was processing capacity and selective attention. I found this interesting because we have a lot of things that go through our brain on a daily basis and to know how the processing capacity and selective attention works is something that I feel is very important because if we are not able to pay attention to a particular stimuli. Channel capacity inability to process all sensory cues simultaneously. Selective attention is analogous to shinning a flashlight in a darkened room to see which items are interesting while the other items remain dark. This was interesting to me because you often wonder what make is that particular items more attractive that it gathers our attention rather than other objects.

4)
Something that I didn't find very interesting was the part in the book over illusions. I feel that this was the most boring part of the chapter because it is something that is often talked about a lot in psychology classes and something's that you have learned a lot become boring after learning the same things over and over. Psychophysics are something that we have studied many classes and some of the other classes have went into more greater detail and looked at some particular illusions.

5)

This chapter gave me more intense knowledge about the five senses and how each sense is wired to our brain. I think that this chapter and the section over memory and attention will be very important in understanding cognitive psychology because they play such a vital part in the role of how our brain functions. I think that this chapter was particularly vital to our understanding of the brain and cognitive psychology. If we want to know about how the brain functions we must know about all the parts and how each surrounding we interact with everyday impact this.

6)
THis chapter builds on the pervious chapter by yet again expanding what we have learned so far about the field of cognitive psychology. We have looked at how the world around us has a perception on how we view things but now we are able to relate the information about the senses and to the brain and how each relate to the field of cognitive psychology.

7)
A topic that would be interesting to look farther into would be illusions but not just illusions but to look at actual illusions that have been used as a psychophysics and how that specific study is used in psychophysics. But to know how each illusion effects the brain and how they effect of cognitive information.

8)
While reading this chapter I was thinking about how each of the senses effect our daily life and how each of them are used to effect our brain. I thought about each of the senses like memory and thought and vision. To look at how vision actually works and how they each stimuli had a effect on how we perceive each object.

9)
Vision, cones, attention, rods, channel capacity, illusion, psychophysics, selective attention.

1.A. Prior Knowledge.
B. The text discuses the ways in which prior knowledge can influence what one sees. The text uses an example of an archeologist believing huts were made out of a specific shape and then being more likely to see that shape while excavating. I found this interesting because of it’s role in explaining why people tend to confirm stereotypes they have about others. Prior knowledge influencing current perception does not appear to be entirely bad however. The text uses the example of learning how to read to demonstrate how past experiences can be very useful in our day to day lives.

2.A. Iconic Storage
B. Our text describes iconic storage as being the “persistence of visual impressions” and also goes on to note that these persisting impressions can be further processed by the brain. This is hypothesized to allow the brain to catch up when trying to process visual information rapidly. I found this interesting because it made me curious about if the persistence was an adaptation of the eye or if the brain had adapted to process the image. In other words it made me wonder if in the beginning the persistence was a defect similar to how we think about image retention on a TV.

3.A. Saccades.
B. Saccades relate to how people read. Saccades are “jumps” that the eye makes from one anchor point to another. Despite notions about the eye gliding across a line of text, this hopping from one anchor point to another is how people seem to read. I found this very interesting as I have difficulty reading, and I have not ever read about how the majority of people read I therefore had no idea of how reading happens for most people. I am sometimes somewhat surprised at how fast an average reader reads something and to know that they make jumps/saccades and still read as efficiently as they do is interesting to me.

4.A. Vision.
B. The discussion of vision was what I found least interesting in the chapter. I did not find it interesting, like other things from past chapters, because it has been covered so much in other classes. Also having had to memorize so many characteristics of the eye in a previous courses makes me instantly much less interested in any discussion of ganglion cells or ciliary muscles. It may have been more interesting to me if it was much more in depth and more examples of how everything it was describing functioned.

5. I believe prior knowledge will be the most useful construct in trying to understand cognitive psychology. If it is not the most useful I believe it would at least be very useful as it sounds like something that could be manipulated easily in an experiment. If something is easy to experimentally manipulate such as priming someone with a sentence to give an expectation of something then there is likely a substantial amount of research on this topic. With more published research comes more knowledge about this topic and by proxy cognitive science.
6. This chapter builds on the previous chapter about cognitive neuroscience. In this chapter, the main focus is how specific body parts/senses allow us to experience sensation, perception and attention. The chapter discuses how these body parts are related to the brain’s processing of the information it receives from them. The occipital lobe was discussed in the last chapter and here the third chapter the describes how it and not they eye it self is responsible for human’s seeing color. Another example of this chapter building on the previous chapter’s discussion of the brain is labeled lines in the brain and their relationship to sensory function.

7. Saccades. I would like to learn more about Saccades. My biggest reason for wanting to learn more about saccades is that there was not very much information on it in the chapter. What information that was present was interesting but it could have been more in depth. It could have compared and contrasted the saccades of people with and without reading disorders. Or it could have related saccades to some other portion of the chapter that was relevant to saccades. Instead the section it was in focused largely on other matters. Although like anything in these chapters there would be an enormous body of literature on each matter being too large to fit into an undergraduate textbook.

8. While reading the chapter I thought a lot about how experiences can influence perception. Building off my older posts I wondered about how early life stressors may effect perception. For example perhaps being stressed out a lot now or in the past leads one to be ‘looking for’ stressors in their environment. I also wondered how membership in a minority group could influence perception. For example, a historically oppressed group is likely better at identifying discriminatory/oppressive actions against members of their in-group than out-group members are.

9. Perception, saccades, cognitive neuroscience, sensation, attention, eye, ganglion cells, ciliary muscle, labeled lines, brain, occipital lobe, iconic storage, vision, in-group, out-group

1a) The first thing I found interesting in this chapter was the definitions of sensation and perception.
1b) This was interesting to me because they are two terms that are commonly used in our vocabulary. Given this, I never really thought I would have to learn the actual definitions because they seem so simple. To me sensation means how we feel and experience things, and perception is how we perceive them/what we think about them. The book, however, gives a different definition sensation refers to the initial detection of energy from the physical world and deals with the structure and processes of the sensory mechanism and the stimuli that affect them while perception involves a higher order cognition in the interpretation of the sensory information. This definition feels way too wordy but the next part gives a better understanding: sensation= the initial detection of stimuli; perception= an interpretation of the things we sense.
2a) The next thing I found interesting was the concept of illusions.
2b) This was interesting to me because I find it crazy how easy it is to trick our brains. In the picture of the young/old women I sat and I stared for a good five minutes before I could actually make out the old woman's face. Illusions occur when our perception is different than reality, but they can provide insight into how our perceptual system works. It is also interesting to read about how our prior knowledge, previous hypotheses/prejudices, and our sensory signals have a different effect on this too. The example of the teacher telling us to find the animal was a good example and helped me to better understand what this all meant.
3a) The last thing I found interesting was the concept of automatic processing.
3b) This again was something that I originally would think of as a common sense topic, but the more I read into it the more I was intrigued by it. I really liked the example they gave regarding to the scuba person practicing taking off their gear over and over again so that in a time of emergency this would become an automatic process, they wouldn’t panic or think twice, this would just come as the natural reaction to the circumstances.
4a) All in all I found this chapter as a whole disinteresting, particularly the section on attention.
4b) I thought that this chapter was way to densely packed with vocabulary terms and definitions. It wasn’t a fun read at all, I found myself getting bored very easily and I had a hard time following what each section was getting at. I didn’t like the section on attention just because of how long it was. I thought things dragged on quite a bit, and also I felt as if the way the text described certain topics was to elaborate for what its actual meanings were (I thought some things were pretty common sense like the pop out effect).
5) What did you read in the chapter that you think will be most useful to in understanding Cognitive Psychology?
Overall I think that the most important information I learned in this chapter would be the definition of computational brain. This will have a very important definition along the road of learning about cognitive psychology because of the nature of the term’s definition: the mind is what the brain does-it processes information. This idea further branches out into sensation and perception, and has an umbrella effect with all other terminology used.
6) How, in what ways, does this chapter relate (build on) to the previous chapters?
I noticed several different topics brought up in chapter three that have already been mentioned in previous chapters. One of the firsts was psychophysics as it relates to illusions, which we talked about in chapter one. Also in chapter 1 we learned about models used in cognitive psychology and this was brought up again pertaining to selective attention. Finally chapter three gave an example of how PET scans, which we discussed in chapter 2, are used when studying attention.
7a) What topic would you like to learn more about?
I would like to learn more about different types of illusions and how they are used in different types of settings.
7b) Why?
I thought that out of everything in this chapter illusions were one of the most interesting things. I found myself getting caught up trying to figure out the second picture, and it really just made me curious to learn more.
8) What ideas related to what you were reading (what did you think about) did you have while reading the chapter?
When I was reading about sight and light and they started talking about how different life would be if all we could see was infra red light, I just started wondering about all of the different components of light and thought about how differently blind people perceive the world. Next when they were talking about attention overload and asked the question of is this what happens in children with ADD? I was really curious about this because it seems to make sense.
9) Terms: Computational brain, attention, illusions, PET scans, models, psychophysics, sensation, perception, pop-out effect, automatic processing

After reading chapter three there were some things that I found interesting. The first thing that I found interesting was the section on iconic storage/memory. I had learned about this in another psychology class, but was not completely familiar with the topic, so it was nice to gain further knowledge. The second thing that I liked from the chapter was the section on echoic memory. Kind of like Iconic memory, but it deals with auditory memory. These two topics are fairly similar in the way that we remember information. The third thing that I enjoyed from this chapter was the cocktail party effect. I liked this section because it is something that I could relate to. I have experienced this effect several times before, so it is nice to learn about the topic and understand what is happening. The thing that I did not find interesting in this chapter was the section the filter model. I do not know that I did not like it because it was interesting, but there really was not anything to terrible in this chapter. I will also talk about how this chapter relates to cognitive psychology, how this chapter builds off the last, what topic I would like to learn more about, and what ideas I had while reading this chapter.

The first that I liked was the section on iconic memory storage. This section talked about how well we remember things that we see, and how long they stay in our memory. The example that the book gave was a study that showed participants nine letters, and had them recall as many letters as they could. When asked to recall the numbers the participants could only recall about 4 or 5 letters. The experiment was manipulated when a tone was matched with the set of letters. The participants then found it easier to recall the letters. Recall increased significantly to almost 100%. The study found that when the amount of time the tone was introduced after the letters were shown the worse the recall of the letters. After about .5 seconds after letters were introduced to participants the amount of letters they recalled dropped and continued to do so with increased time in between. I remember doing an experiment like this in Butlers class a couple years ago. The test was familiar to the one the study did to its participants. I wonder if this is the same as the +-2 rule that I have learned about.

The next thing that I enjoyed from the chapter was the section on echoic storage. Echoic memory is the same as iconic memory in the sense that information is stored for a very short time. Actually I find echoic memory somewhat boring to talk about, so I will talk about something more interesting such as channel capacity and selective attention. Channel capacity is our inability to process everything around us. Since there is so much stimuli that can occur in a given setting, our brains find it hard to record and analyze all of the information. When this happens our brains will short circuit because of the overload. What the brain does in this situation is bottleneck the amount of information that we allow to the brain. This is called selective attention. Selective attention is like using a flashlight in a dark room. The amount of information that we can process is the amount of light that is shining in the room. This experiment pertains to me in the case of ADHD. I had to do some tests like the color one that the books talks about to see if I had the disorder The test shows you the names of colors on a piece of paper, but the color will be filled in with a different color that is not the same color as the name portrays. This can be a very difficult task for someone with ADHD because of the cognitive interference that the task creates.

The third that I found interesting in the chapter was the section on the cocktail party effect. I liked this section because it was something that I could relate to most in the chapter. Having experiences this effect multiple times I had never understood the real meaning behind the effect. You experience this effect when you are engaged in conversation in a busy room, and then all of a sudden you hear your name across the room. You immediately turn your head to listen to what is being said about you. The happens because of shadowing. Shadowing allows us to be focused on one set of information while tuning out other information that is going on around us. The one circumstance that happens when this is interrupted is when the stimuli is something that is important to the person such as their name. This was interesting to me to learn about because it is something that occurs on a daily basis, so it makes it fun to learn about in the textbook.

One thing that I was still interesting to me, but not as much as the other three was the filter model. The theory states that information is restricted to channel capacity. Messages traveling along a specific nerve can differ either according to which nerve fibers they stimulate or according to the number of nerve impulses they produce. To make sure that all information is recorded by the brain we have to make sure that there is not an overload of the system. The filter model allows us to switch from channel to channel to extract information that is presented to us. The book gives an example of a study the broadbent did. When participants were asked to repeat what they had heard they should have said gibberish because the information came from one channel. Except what really happened was that participants said the numbers in order because they had switched from channel to channel to understand the sequence of the numbers being presented to them.

I think that the section on the cocktail party effect helped me understand cognitive psychology more because it was something that I enjoyed reading about. I have had this happen to me before so it was cool to actually learn about it and now know what my brain is doing when I am in a crowded room and suddenly my attention is drawn from conversation because I heard my name. I think that when you are interested in the information from the text that it not only makes it more interesting to read about, but that it will also make it easier to remember when the topic is brought up again in the future.

I think that this chapter build off the last chapter because now we learned about some of the different areas of the brain that use memory and how that memory is stored. In the last chapter we read about the lobotomies and the discovery of the different areas of the brain. In this chapter it goes deeper and I learned about the areas of the brain and the functions that they have when it comes to memory storage. This book goes a good job of building off the last chapters.

Something that I would like to learn more about would be the section on the cocktail party effect. I think that I would like to learn more about it because it was interesting for me to read about. Also I did not really talk about the shadow aspect of the theory a lot, so I would like to did a little deeper in to that aspect of the theory. Since I found it so easy to read about, I think that doing more research on the topic would be easy to do and fun to learn about new information on the area.

Thoughts that I had while reading the chapter had to do with the most interesting thing that I liked about the chapter, and that was the cocktail party effect. The book said has this ever happened to you, and I began to think of times when this did happen to me. I was at a party and was talking to a friend and then I heard the name of my roommate. I looked to the direction of the name and began to listen to what was being said by the persons, so I could get information. The person was very far across the room, so I was amazed that I even heard it when I was in such deep conversation with my friend.

terms: iconic storage, iconic memory, echoic storage/memory, filter model, cocktail party phenomenon, shadowing, channel capacity, selective attention, Broadbent, ADHD,

The first section that I found interesting was the one on prior knowledge. This is where the relationship between perception and your prior knowledge of the world influences what you see and how you interpret things. Our perception is based on previous knowledge that we have, as well as our prejudices and sensory signals. I liked this section because there were optical illusions that went along with it. I enjoy looking at things and trying to find both pictures. Sometimes it is very hard for me to see the second picture that exists. This section also brought up the interesting point that our perceptions are based on our past experiences. Without the prior knowledge that we all have, doing almost anything would be impossible. This is something that we don't often think about, but we, as humans, have learned so much more than we are even aware of.

Another section that I enjoyed was the one that discussed the perceptual span. Our perceptual span is how much we can experience in a brief exposure. Each person has a sensory store that holds on to a sensation for a few seconds after we have it. This does not last, however. Emile Javal was a professor who discovered that we do not read things by following a line and continuing line by line down a page, we read by jumping around to different words. The jumps are called saccades. This indicated that only four or five random letters could be gathered at one time. This section interested me because I never thought about how I can still see things for a second after they happen, and I never pay attention to how I read, unless I am in a hurry or am reading something that doesn't interest me.

The last thing I found interesting was the one on attention. When it is talked about it cognitive psychology, attention refers to the ability to block out the things around you that do not pertain to what you are doing. It is the ability to focus on one task and block everything else out. It is interesting to think that there are thousands of external stimuli present in every situation, but that is the case. If we were not able to block out 99% of the stimuli we would not be able to focus well enough to complete any tasks. It is interesting for me to think about, because I have a hard time focusing on homework or reading my textbook when there are other things going on around me. I have to turn the TV off and cannot play any music. When I am working, however, I am able to listen to one person while doing a task for another and sometimes I can even juggle a third or fourth activity in there as well. This might just be selectiveness on my part.

One section I did not find very interesting was the part on vision. I have taken biology classes and sensation and perception. Because of this I am well aware of how the eye transfers information to the brain. Light rays enter through the cornea and lens, which then transfer the image to the retina. I also know that an eye has both rods and cones in it, and that rods are sensitive to things that are well lit, while cones are located in the fovea and are sensitive to things that are not.

I think that this chapter will be helpful in understanding cognitive psychology in that sensations and perceptions make up a large part of cognitive psychology. If we were not aware of what we saw or heard, we would not be able to do nearly as much as we can now. We would miss a lot of information in our environment and might as well be blind and deaf.

This chapter builds on the previous chapters in that the last chapter talked about neuroscience, and a lot of the information from this chapter was probably discovered using some neuroscientific methods, such as MRI's and PET scans.

I would like to learn more about illusions and how they are made and discovered. I always wondered how they come around; do people make these images on purpose or are they accidental?

While reading this chapter I thought a lot about my experiences with perception. I also thought about my memory and language class that I took, because we talk about transferring vision to memory in that class. I also thought about optical illusions that I have seen and how they effected me.

terms:
prior knowledge, perception, sensory signals, optical illusions, perceptual span, Emile Javal, saccades, cognitive psychology, attention, external stimuli, selectiveness, vision, cornea, lens, fovea, cones, rods, retina, neuroscience

1a. I found the section on iconic storage to be pretty interesting. When we see something the image becomes stored for a short amount of time in our ICONIC MEMORY. Iconic memory is independent of higher order processing and is essentially made up snapshots of what we have just seen. The images are short lived lasting only about a second and gives the brain a chance to catch up with the visual stimulus it receives from the eye.
2a. I found this interesting because they were actually able to demonstrate this phenomena through experimentation. In the experiment participants were shown 9 letters each in rows of three. Each row has a corresponding tone. The top row would be a high pitch, the middle a medium pitch, etc. The participant would be briefly shown the letters and then hear a tone. When the tone was played immediately with the flashing image participants’ recall would be very precise. When the tone was delayed by a second or more recall of the letters in that row diminished greatly. This showed that we do indeed have iconic memory of images that fades rapidly after seeing the stimulus.
1b. Reading about ILLUSIONS was very interesting. Illusions occur when reality and our perception of it do not align. Illusions are partly the result of using our past experiences to interpret the stimulus in way that might not match reality. The book also mentions that illusions may occur because of invariant structures in our brains. I find it very interesting that when shown illusions that depict a picture that could be multiple things, such as a picture that could be seen as a rabbit or a duck we only see it one way at first, then after some time we may be able to see the alternative picture, but we can never interpret both images at once.
2b. I found illusions interesting because unlike other concepts in the chapter the concept of illusions was easily demonstrated in different ways in the chapter.
3a. I found the concept of LABELED LINES to be interesting. Labeled lines refer to different nerves in the body corresponding to specific sensory functions. It explains the phenomena of seeing stars when taking a blow to the back of the head. Getting hit in the back of the head damages the occipital lobe which is responsible for visual processing. When it gets hit it produces the image of “stars” in our visual field even though we are not physically seeing the stars in our environment.
3b. I found this concept interesting because there have been many times I have seen “stars” after being really light headed or taking a blow to the head. I never thought to question why this might occur, and it is pretty interesting to now learn why it is that happens.
4a. I found the very first section on vision to be uninteresting.
4b. It tries to describe the process of seeing something and introduces the different structures of the eye. I just found it to be a pretty rushed explanation and it could have benefited from more models or illustrations of the process to help visualize the process.
5. I think that the sections on sensory stores and sensory memory systems will be very beneficial to know. Cognitive psychology seems to deal a lot with both memory and sensory perceptions, getting to know the basics on these topics, I feel, will give me a good base to learn more detailed information later.
6. This chapter continues to build our base knowledge about what all cognitive psychology deals with. While the previous two chapters were a little more broad in scope, this chapter goes deeper into explaining different cognitive processes.
7a. I would like to learn more about our CHANNEL CAPACITY. Channel capacity refers to how many sensory events we can attend to at one time. Apparently there is an upward limit that has to do with our neurological limitations.
7b. I would like to know what that limit of our capacity is and if it could possibly be increased, maybe through some kind SELECTIVE ATTENTION training where we practice being more aware of our environment.
8. While reading the chapter I thought a lot about the sensory perceptions I feel and how I have experienced a lot of the things they were talking about. It was interesting to relate what I have experienced to the science behind what is I experienced.
9.Iconic memory, illusions, labeled lines, channel capacity, selective attention.

1a) What did you find interesting?
Psychophysics
1b) Why was it interesting to you?
Psychophysics was interesting to me because it uses different measures to try and determine our ability to perceive and how our perceptual system works. One way psychophysicists have been able to measure our perceptual abilities is through the use of illusions. These are cases when reality and perception do not match, sometimes the illusion might be influenced by our past experiences or possibly something even deeper within the structures of the brain.
2a) What did you find interesting?
Sensory Store
2b) Why was it interesting to you?
This was interesting to me because while I was reading the section I could easily relate to how our perceptual span lasts for moments after a stimulus. Anytime you close your eyes you can still see the images that were just right in front of you but they soon fade away, this is something that has always intrigued me. Most data suggests the information gathered in a single exposure usually lasts anywhere from 4-6 seconds.
3a) What did you find interesting?
Subliminal perception.
3b) Why was it interesting to you?
I found this interesting because I’ve always heard of subliminal messages and how they can theoretically be used to suggest a person to do something. Subliminal refers to stimuli that is just below the sensory threshold and actually unable to perceive. Subliminal perception has been used by advertisers since the 50s as an effort to increase sales of varies goods. While the effects of subliminal messaging has never been fully proven it has shown to be somewhat suggestive, it is however regarded among most as a pseudoscience.
4a) What one (1) thing did you find the least interesting?
Attention
4b) Why wasn't it interesting to you?
I actually found most of this chapter to be very interesting but the section that took me the longest to read through was the one covering attention. While I was interested in William James’s work with attention deficit the rest of the section was pretty dry.
5) What did you read in the chapter that you think will be most useful to in understanding Cognitive Psychology?
This chapter did a good job of explaining how many of the processes we use in our daily lives work. Every day we must navigate a world with tons of stimuli and without a finely tuned perceptual ability we might all be lost, having a better understanding of these systems will be helpful.
6) How, in what ways, does this chapter relate (build on) to the previous chapters?
This chapter continued where the previous left off in that it continued to talk about the separate functions of the brain and how we use each one of those to manage our lives. This chapter went more in depth about the eye development and vision.
7a) What topic would you like to learn more about?
Subliminal messages
7b) Why?
These have been used in propaganda around the world as well as in marketing by many ad campaigns to help sell products. I would like to know more about how they work and if they are effective.
8) What ideas related to what you were reading (what did you think about) did you have while reading the chapter?
While I was reading this chapter it kept reminding me of the show Braingames on national geographic, the show deals with different ways to trick your brain…or rather how your brain can trick you. It is a great show that aims to educate the public on all the uncertainty but new discoveries about the brain.
9) Once you are done with your post make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
-perceptual span, sensory store, illusion, psychophysics, sensation, stimuli, subliminal perception, subliminal message, William James, attention

1. The first thing that I found interesting in the chapter was the section devoted to vision and the stucture of the eye. The subject has come up in previous classes such as biopsychology and I remembered most of the information presented but not all of it. Things such as the cornea,retina, rods and cones were easy to remember, along with their individual functions in the eye, but I couldn't recall ganglion cells or the lateral geniculate nucleus. I was surprised that these two terms couldn't be remembered considering their important contribution in transmitting visual data to the visual cortex, especially since ganglion cells are what travel through the blind spot in the back of the eye, which is a subject that has interesting me for a long time. I was also interested in the small section discussing the attempts to emulate human vision with computers by constructing an artificial eye. I was disappointed that this point wasn't discussed in more detail but was glad to see that it will be mentioned later in chapter 15.

2. The second thing that I found interesting in the chapter was the discussion of illusions. Reading through the previous posts, I could see that my interest in this subject is shared by a lot of my classmates, which is understandable. Illusions are something that we have all encountered at some point, either in our everyday life or in psychology classes. The various figures presented in this section were all things that I had been exposed to previously at some point but I still found them interesting. It was nice to have a psychological explanation for why some of the various illusions work. The rotating snakes illusion and others like it are something that I have seen a lot and I enjoyed having the explanation presented that it's because the luminance changes in the pattern and the periphery of our vision interperets this as movement. The explanation that we are hard-wired to perceive the world in a certain way and that is further influenced by past experiences to shape our perception of things was also interesting and relates well to how various people perceive illusions such as Figure 3.5a and b.

3. The third thing that I found particularly interesting in the chapter was the subject of processing capacity and selective attention. This is also something that I have been exposed to previously in other classes and I have always found it interesting. I had never heard of the term channel capacity, which is the inability to process all sensory cues simulaneously. This is a term that I figured I would have been exposed to previously since it explains how the bottlenecking limit on the ability to process information works so concisely. Selective attention is also something that has interested me for a long time and I always relate it to my first experience with the subject, which involved a moonwalking bear. What I am talking about is a video in which two teams of 4 each throw a basketball around, with one team dressed in white and another in black. You are instructed to count how many times the team in white passes the ball and while the chaos is going on and you are trying to focus on the assigned task, a man in a bear costume enters the frame, pauses in the middle to do a little dance, and then moonwalks offscreen. Many people don't see the moonwalking bear because they are so focused on counting the number of passes.

4. I don't think that I found anything in this chapter to be uninteresting. If anything, I found it difficult to select the top 3 subjects that interested me the most to write about.

5. I think that the limit on sensory information storage and how attention helps filter that information will be the most useful information in understanding cognitive psychology. Although all of the information presented in the chapter is important and interesting. This seems to be the most relatable to everyday life and also important to the topic of cognitive psych. It helps to explain how people can remember things differently and why we perceive events differently from someone else.

6. Chapter 3 helps build on the previous chapters by further explaining things such as psychophysics from chapter 1 and expanding upon how our brain helps us interperet various sensory information. It also relates vision and the eye to various structures in the brain explained in chapter 2.

7. I would like to learn more about various things involving visual attention. Things like the pop-out effect and pattern recognition seem very interesting.

8. The main idea that I had related to the chapter was my recollection of the moonwalking bear test. The subject of eyewitness testimony also came to mind many times as I read through the chapter. Some of the subjects addressed in the chapter were also brought up in my Psych & Law class and much of the information in the chapter can be related to the subject.

Terms: vision, cornea, retina, rods, cones, ganglion cells, lateral geniculate nucleus, visual cortex, blind spot, illusions, luminance, processing capacity, channel capacity, selective attention, psychophysics, pattern recognition

Chapter 3
The first thing that I found really interesting in chapter 3 was the information about illusions. I have always found illusions fascinating. The book says that illusions happen when perception and reality do not match. This means that what you think you are seeing is not really what is there. Or maybe it’s both. There are a lot of good examples in the book of different illusions. When I look at these illusions, I see one thing, and then the book points out another thing that is there. It’s really strange how your eyes can deceive you. Or is it your mind that is deceiving you? I also wonder if certain people see illusions differently.
The book also states that perception can be shaped by a person’s prior learning. So this means that illusions, to certain people, are shaped differently due to the person’s prior knowledge. People see illusions differently. For example, there is a picture in the book that looks like a young girl, but it also looks like an elder woman. It was simple for me to see the young girl, but it was very difficult for me to see the elderly woman. In someone else’s eyes, they might see the elder woman first, and the young girl second. But neither of us will see them at the same time. This was also very interesting to me.
The second thing that I found interesting from chapter 3 was the section that was titled “Everything We Know is Wrong”. This caught my eye instantly. This section in the chapter is about how we perceive things, and how there are so many other ways to perceive things. There are many things that we cannot see. The example the book gives is of infrared radiation. If we could see infrared radiation, we would view everything differently. It would be the same with any sort of wavelengths that we cannot see. Just a few examples would be x-rays, gamma rays, or even waves of radar. There are only certain things that we can see. And this is why everyone’s perception is different. I think of someone who is color blind. They perceive things completely different than someone who is not color blind. Or I think of someone who has to wear glasses because they have bad vision. If they were without their glasses, they would perceive things much differently than someone who has 20/20 vision.
The third thing that I found interesting about chapter 3 was selective attention. My mother always tells my father that he has “selective hearing”, which really helped me relate to this part in the reading. I think what my mother really meant was that my father has selective attention. The example the book gives says that selective attention is like shining a flashlight in a dark room. You can only see certain things at a time. If you have selective attention, you only concentrate on specific things at a certain time. Everything else seems to be in the distance/background. I think that this is very interesting. But I think that it also makes sense. You can’t really concentrate on everything at once. This kind of goes back to the idea of illusions. When you see an illusion, you can’t see both of them at once. You can only see one of the images at a time.
What I found least interesting was the information about attention and neuroscience. I have never really been interested in neuroscience. I really like learning about how the mind works and why we think and do the things we do. That’s why I have become a psychology major. But I have never really enjoyed learning about the parts of the brain and the different functions of the brain. It’s something that I have discussed and been taught in many of my college courses. But it is also something that I have a hard time wrapping my mind around. Whenever I come across a chapter on the physiology of the brain and the structures and functions of the brain, I have to re-read the information multiple times before I can soak any of it in.
I think all of this will be useful in my learning about cognitive psychology. This chapter is all about sensation, perception, and attention. These are 3 main things concerning the subject of cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is all about mental processes and how we perceive information. I think that chapter 3 will be very detrimental to my learning in this cognitive psychology course.
Chapter 3 builds on the previous chapters because we have already discussed the basic concepts of cognitive psychology and we have discussed neuroscience. Chapter 3 looks deeper into these concepts and teaches us about how we perceive certain things. So far I feel that we have just been skimming the surface. And I feel that now we are starting to get down to the smaller details.
I would really like to do further research on the concept of illusions. I enjoyed reading about illusions and how they are perceived. All of the information makes sense when I read it, but I have never thought about it in this way before. I would like to know if there is something certain that makes people perceive illusions differently. I also would like to know what it is inside everyone’s brains that makes things seem like illusions. There must be something specific that makes us see illusions. I would also like to see if certain people can see though illusions better than others. I believe this to be true, but I would like to see for sure.
In all honesty, when I read this chapter, I thought a lot about my own thoughts. I was thinking mostly about the way that I perceive things. I was thinking about my attention and the sensations that I experience. In that way, it was easier for me to relate to the chapter and really learn the terms that were presented to me.

Terms: Illusions, Perception, Reality, Selective Attention, Attention, Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology

1)the part about attention caught my attention. this is something that i do have trouble with. i like that we can give our attention to whatever we want and block out the rest. the one example that i am fimilar with is how it is hard to pay attention or listen to someone that you are talking to if something nearby sounds better.

2) i like looking at the illusions they are just neat. i like it when you look at something for so long and then it just comes to you and then you cant stop seeing it. i think that our brains are wired to see things only one way but we can change it look past it and see it all in a different way.

3) i like reading about preception as well. i know for a fact that there are only a few people that precive things the same way that i do. which i think is neat and also makes me feel weird sometimes about the things that i say. but a lot of crazy people that saw things differntly made a lot of new discoveries in the field of psychology.

4) i like it all.

5)for me i think perception and attention

6) how the brain works with preceptiong and attention.

7) memory how does it work and why do we remember somethings one way and others that we try hard to remember just isn't there
8) about how hard the brain works and all the cool stuff it does.