Go to the site classics in the history of psychology and pick one of the articles in perception. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/topic.htm#perception
After reading the article please discuss:
1) Why did you pick this article?
2) What was the article about and how does it relate to the material we discussed so far in class (if it doesn't then just say so)?
3) What did you find interesting about this article?
4) What do you think makes it an important classic in the history of psychology?
5) What does your text say about the material covered in the article?
6) Make a list of the terms and concepts you used in this post.
Let me know if you have any questions,
--Dr. M
1.Before I read this article I expected it to be about some type of experiment that deals with perception. I chose this because we can learn a lot from doing different types of experiments. They give us many explanations for why things are the way they are in psychology. I’m hoping this article talks about an experiment that looks at how our perception works or something to do with how our eyes see illusions or colors.
2.This article starts off talking about different types of experiments. One type was a test on cutaneous sensitivity. An example of that was a test seeing people’s tolerance sensation and where they will stop when it becomes too painful. Another type mentioned was motor aptitudes. Another example that involves perception was about rapidity of perception. The experimenter showed the subject certain images and colors and the subject had to recall as many objects and the colors of them as possible. This test indicates the extent of memory and the time of presentation that is sufficient for exact perception. This article doesn’t really talk about anything that we’ve discussed in class.
3.I thought this article was interesting because it had a lot of different experiments that dealt with memory and perceiving images, color, and words. This article for the most part didn’t interest me because it had so much different information that was supposed to all be related; however it was hard to keep up with all the information and numbers the article was throwing out.
4.This article is an important classic in the history of psychology because experimental psychology has brought a lot of people together; people from different countries. There are also a lot of universities that are equipped for experimental psychology and are able to run experiments in laboratories. The experiments mentioned using different apparatuses that have more than likely been used again. Some of the ideas that came from the experiments are most likely used on a regular basis with current experimental psychology.
5.My textbook mentions cutaneous sensation, which is sensation based on the stimulation of receptors in the skin. It also mentions somatosensory system which includes the receptors for the somatic senses and the pathways that transmit signals generated by these receptors up the spinal cord toward the brain. The information in the article shows that some parts of the skin are more sensitive than others and this is explained by cutaneous sensation. These sensations are then transmitted to the brain. The text briefly mentions different focuses for cutaneous sensations: tactile perception which refers to all perceptions except pain that are caused by displacement of the skin, perception of temperature which is caused by heating or cooling of the skin, and perception of pain which is caused by stimuli that are potentially damaging to the skin.
6.Cutaneous sensation, somatosensory system, receptors, somatic senses, tactile perception, cutaneous sensitivity, mote aptitudes, perception.
Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception (1947)
Jerome S. Bruner and Cecile C. Goodman1
Harvard University
1) I picked this article because after reviewing the other articles I found it to be the easiest to read. One other article I reviewed was translated from an original French article, and it was very awkward to read so I gave up on it quickly. I also chose this article because the title made me believe it somehow would tie into class, and the visual rules our brain has when processing visual stimuli.
2) This experiment has 30 ten year old children view a light circle on a screen. The children then tried to recreate the circle’s size based on memory of the circle they had just previously seen. The child was then asked to draw circles the size of other objects from memory such as a penny, and a half dollar. The hypothesis of the study was that the higher the subjective value of an object, the bigger the person will estimate it to be. The results of the study were that the poor children overestimated the size of the coins when drawing them. It is believed because the coins held higher subjective value to them because they were lacking money as opposed to the rich children. This relates to class material because our perception of objects differs based on if we feel the information is important. We don’t focus our attention and visual skills in on objects that are not interesting, or necessary. It also relates to class because how we see and remember objects is not as accurate as we think.
3) I found it interesting that subjective value influences our memory of objects. We often times think our memory of objects is accurate, but we actually may exaggerate or underestimate objects depending on how important the stimuli is to us. I did not actually enjoy reading this article however. I found it difficult to read, and did not like how the article was organized. I’m use to having a clear intro, methods, results, and discussion section in articles.
4) I believe this article is important to psychology because it’s an example about how our cognitions affect our memories. How we see objects and remember them has many more complex parts than just visually processing the stimuli. We accent, or change our perceptions based on past experiences, stereotypes, beliefs, and expectations.
5) My textbook discusses how we focus on objects we assign as important. An example of this given in the textbook is that we automatically focus on movement, and this has evolutionary roots. We focus on movement because it could potentially be a predator so this is assigned as very important to us. In this same way, we have assigned money as important to us because of what it can get us. I had trouble finding any information about subjective value and memory perceptions in my textbook. I did find in my textbook however a section about how we are active observers. It states that attention adds its own twist to visual processing. Things we attend to are physiologically enhanced, and those that we don’t attend to are not enhanced or may in fact be inhibited. So in this way, we assign our perceptions value and chose what we see. Our brain cognitions are not passive in the visual processing chain.
6) Terms: subjective value, memory, cognitions, perception value
1. I chose to read The Experimental Psychology Laboratory of the University of Madison. I really didn’t know what to expect considering the title said the article was about a laboratory and not a specific experiment.
2. This article was about a number of experiments. It didn’t go into detail on the statistics of the experiments but explained the tools and techniques used to measure different aspects of human perception. The article lists 26 different techniques used to test how people perceive weight, texture, pain, motor skills, reaction time, memory, muscle memory, vision and etc. The 26 tests were given to males and females and took about 2 hours to complete. The tests were all very simple such as line up these weights lightest to heaviest without looking at them. Another was line these wires up in order of roughness without looking at them. The participants didn’t exhort themselves in any of the studies they were just asked to order things by feel. This article relates to what we have talked about in class because it’s all about ways to measure perception. This lab didn’t measure just visual perception but perception of weight, texture, size, pain, and word association.
3. I found how simple the tests were to be interesting. Normally when we ready a study there is a lot of statistics and set up information given and it’s hard to follow what they were looking for and what they found. This article lists all the different tests and how they worked. It didn’t give the exact results in this article but that’s not what the article was for. It was written to understand the procedures and I think it did that clearly. I have to admit when I started reading the article the first paragraph was confusing because I was waiting to see what the paper was about and it didn’t get to the point right away but after the introduction it was much easier to understand. The test themselves were very simple for the participants as well as for us to understand and researchers still got the information they needed.
4. I think this is an important article because it proves that experiments don’t always have to be extravagant to get the results you are looking for. Sometimes simple is better. I also think the things they tested; pain, weight and texture perception etc. were all things that needed to be tested if not for exploration this gave them a base line to compare other information to.
5. The text has a lot of information on perception tests but I couldn’t find anything on this particular article. The book goes more in depth on statistics and why you perceive something a certain way. The article was just on the techniques used to measure different forms of perception.
6. Perception, visual, association, techniques.
On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm
Jerome S. Bruner and Leo Postman (1949)
Harvard University
1) I really did not know what to expect based on the title of the article. When I skimmed over it, it contained an experiment that seemed relatively easy to understand. Experiments usually help me to understand the material given the article subject.
2) The article started off by stating that perceiving represents 2 complex sets of specifications. One set describes the conditions of stimulation. This is done by physical measures (ie: wavelength) or psychological norms (ie: description of a picture as that picture is seen by "normal" observers under optimal continuous and with a set for accuracy). There have been poor efforts to analyze the dimensions of the sets and to create laws regarding the effectiveness of set in perception. Perceptual expectancies continue to operate as long as they are reinforced by the outcome of events. Incongruity represents a crucial problem for the theory of perception, because its perception represents a violation of expectation. Incongruities are perceived (ie: trial and error).
The Experiment:
28 subjects at Harvard and Radcliffe
-shown 5 different playing cards
-from one to 4 of these cards were incongruous (color and suit reversed).
-order of presentation were random
The cards:
normal cards
-printed in proper color; 5 of hearts, ace of hearts, five of spades, seven of spades.
Trick cards
-printed with color reversed; 3 of hearts (black), four of hearts (black), two of spades (red), six of spades (red), ace of diamonds (black), six of clubs (red).
Fourteen orders of presentation were worked out, and two subjects were presented the cards in each of these orders. There were three types of stimulus series: (1) a single trick card embedded in a series of four normal cards; (2) a single normal card embedded in a series of four trick cards; (3) mixed series in which trick and normal cards were in the ratio of 3:2 or 2:3.
Each card was presented successively until correct recognition occurred, three times each at 10 ms., 30 ms., 50 ms., 70 ms., 100ms., 150 ms., 200 ms., 250 ms., 300 ms., 400 ms., 450 ms., 500 ms., and then in steps of 100 ms. to 1000 ms. If at 1000 ms. recognition did not occur, the next card was presented. In determining thresholds, correct recognition was defined as two successive correct responses. At each exposure, the subject was asked to report everything he saw or thought he saw.
Results:
The most central finding is that the recognition threshold for the incongruous playing cards (whose with suit and color reversed) is significantly higher than the threshold for normal cards. While normal cards on the average were recognized correctly -- here defined as a correct response followed by a second correct response -- at 28 milliseconds, the incongruous cards required 114 milliseconds. The difference, representing a fourfold increase in threshold, is highly significant statistically.
This design was such that we might test the hypothesis that the more experience a subject had had in the past with incongruity, the less difficulty would he have in recognizing incongruity of a related nature.
Dominance reaction: 27 out of our 28 subjects showed dominance responses to the trick cards in their records, some considerably more than others
Compromise reaction: a compromise perception is one in which the resultant perception embodies elements of both the expected attribute and the attribute provided by stimulation.
Disruption: a failure of the subject to organize the perceptual field at a level of efficiency usually associated with a given viewing condition.
Conclusion:
-Reaffirmation of the general statement that perceptual organization is powerfully determined by expectations built upon past commerce with the environment. When such expectations are violated by the environment, the perceiver's behavior can be described as resistance to the recognition of the unexpected or incongruous. The resistance manifests itself in subtle and complex but nevertheless distinguishable perceptual responses.
-Among the perceptual processes which implement this resistance are (1) the dominance of one principle of organization which prevents the appearance of incongruity and (2) a form of "partial assimilation to expectancy" which we have called compromise. When these responses fail and when correct recognition does not occur, what results may best be described as perceptual disruption. Correct recognition itself results when inappropriate expectancies are discarded after failure of confirmation.
3) I found it interesting that the threshold was higher in those cards whose suit and color were reversed. The more experience a subject had in the past with incongruity, the less difficult it would be in recognizing incongruity of a related nature.
4) This has to do with the perception of color matching and suit matching in cards (to be specific to this article). It is fascinating what our mind does to process information and how we interpret what we see base on past experiences/knowledge.
5) I was not sure how to go about looking up this information in my text. I first started by searching information on stimuli. The text talked about the methods of studying relationships in the perceptual process.
A. Stimulus -> perception
-present a stimulus and determine the person's response
B. Stimulus -> physiology
-present a stimulus and measure the electrical response in the nervous system
C. Physiology -> perception
-measure physiological and perceptual responses to the same stimuli.
It states that when we categorize a stimulus by naming it, we are measuring recognition. The absolute threshold is the smallest amount of stimulus energy necessary to detect a stimulus. The difference threshold is the smallest difference between two stimuli that a person can detect.
6) recognition, disruption, compromise reaction, dominance reaction, incongruity, threshold, stimuli, perception,
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Fechner/
Article on Weber's Law & Measurement on Sensation
1.) I chose this article because I thought it would be interesting to get an understanding of how to measure a person's perception. I also have heard some things about Weber's Law so I chose the article because I was somewhat farmiliar with the topic.
2.) The article talks about Weber's law and the methods used to measure sensations. Weber's law, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law attempts to describe the relationship between the physical magnitude of a particular stimuli and the intensity of that stimuli. So when Weber's law is applied to a person's sensation, what they are seeing is kinetic energy of the object. Kinetic Energy is the energy in an object due to motion. In the article it states that when we see an object we are arousing our sensations. This can lead to a relationship between our sensations and psycho-physical processes. This theory is important in understanding the relationship between our mind and the processes of the mind. We haven’t talked about this theory in class.
3.) I found this to be an interesting theory. The process of us seeing and object and then processing that object to our brain and then the brain interpreting that information is quite astonishing.
4.) Weber’s law made an important contribution to the history of psychology. This is because the process of understanding what we see through our perception may have been a mystery some years ago. So when this law was contributed people probably understood how the process happens and why. People now can explain why and how such a process has happened and understand it.
5.) The book had lots of useful information about Weber’s Law. They define Weber’s Law as the relation between the size of the different threshold and the magnitude of the standard. This simply means that it measures the difference threshold and asks how it was different with the observer. A good example that the book uses to illustrate the law is if a room contained 10 lit candles and you could detect the addition of 1 candle, then a room containing 100 candles would take an additional 10 candles for you to notice. Weber’s Law allows us to make assumptions on comparing sensitivities across different sensory systems.
6.) Weber’s Law, Kinetic Energy, psycho-physical processes, sensation, perception, sensory systems, difference threshold
Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception
1) I choose this article because I looked through the rest of the articles and this one seemed like the easiest to understand. I began reading multiple articles but became bored and a little lost. This article was the only one I managed to finish.
2) We have not specifically talked about this topic in class although the authors' main concern was to understand how perception works in everyday life. The point of the article was to show that items may be perceived as greater with their increasing social value. the experiment used groups of 10 year olds. They were asked to first create the sizes of coins from memory and then asked to create the sizes of coins while viewing them from a distance of 6 inches from the object of circle creation. The results showed that, typically, as the value of the coin increased, the accuracy decreased. Also, the children were split into rich and poor. The poor children overestimated the sizes of coins at a much greater rate than did the rich children.
3)I didn't find much interesting because the results were not shocking. I did think that the original hypothesis that socially desired objects would be perceived as greater was interesting though.
4) I think this article is important because it took a look at the social aspect of perception and includes an aspect of desire as having an effect. Others at this time studied the biological and physiological aspects of perception and this article brought about new ideas to include.
5) My text doesn't really say anything about this specific topic. It does talk about Fechner's Law and things like just noticeable difference. Weber's Law was also mentioned and it was said to measure a person's perception but more detail was spent of sensations and not the visual aspect.
6) Fechner's Law, Weber's Law, just noticeable difference, sensations, perception
Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception
1) I picked this article because out of the few that were listed under Perception, I found this article to be the most interesting and easiest to follow. Some of the articles were boring and were written in a way that was harder to understand than this one was.
2) The study focused on three different hypotheses: the greater the social value of an object, the more will it be susceptible to organization by behavioral determinants; the greater the individual need for a socially valued object, the more marked will be the operation of behavioral determinants; Perceptional equivality will facilitate the operation of behavioral determinants only in so far as equivocality reduces the operation of autochthonous determinants without reducing the effectiveness of behavioral determinants.
The experiment was split into three groups, two experimental and one control, and 30 children of age 10 were the subjects. The children were shown different sizes of coins, memorized them, and then were asked to recreate the sizes of the coins by drawing. The control group did the same experiment but cardboard disks were used instead of coins. Children that were in the experimental groups perceived coins of a larger value to be larger in size when drawing them from memory even though this was not necessarily the case. The first hypothesis was accepted after this experiment.
The same experiment was done with two experimental groups, one consisting of rich children and one consisting of poor children. The poor children tended to percieve the coins considerably larger than what they actually were compared to the rich children. This was thought to be because poor children have a greater subjective need for money than the rich children did. The second hypothesis failed to be rejected because of this.
This relates to our course material because it discusses the importance of the perceptual process and the visual process to each individual. Different people may see things differently according to their surroundings and perceive things differently according to what's important to them and what's not. In the experiment that was discussed, obviously money was valued more by the poor children, which led to them perceiving the coins to be larger than they actually were and this happens in other life situations, as well.
3) The findings between the poor children and the rich children were the most interesting to me. I figured that poor children would value money more than rich children, because that makes the most sense, but I never thought that the way that they perceived the actual coins would be that much different from one another, and it was. This made me think about perception in a different way.
4) It's important because it shows us that people do perceive things differently and different environmental factors play a role in this, as well as the value and importance of things to different people play a role in how we see and perceive things. Also, the way that one person remembers one thing, may be different that how another person remembers the same exact thing.
5) My text discusses the importance of perception to our survival and how we may perceive things differently than others depending on what is important to us for our own individual survival. Also, it discusses how we link stimulation and perception with each other. Perhaps when the poor children see larger coins, their value seems greater to them because of the larger size, or maybe because a coin has a greater value they perceive it to be larger, because it would be something that could potentially be more important to their survival. They see the round object, they recognize it's a coin, and they detect that the coin has value, which makes the coin important to them.
6) perception, memory, value
Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception
1) After scanning all the titles and publications these articles came from, I chose the Bruner article because it was from an abnormal psychology magazine. I know that's where my heaviest interest lies, so I decided to work from there.
2) The article was a debate over two ideological ways of thinking which are autochthonous and behavioral. Both of these are determinants of perception. Firstly, the authors presented the autochthonous point of perception. I looked the work up and essentially it's another word for "original" or "native". The autochthonous perception resides in the realm of predictable and characteristic responses. Basically, the authors are saying there is no behavior involved in this determinant, it is almost primal and governed by chemical responses. Secondly, we continue to look at the behavioral aspect of perception. This consists of active, adaptive determinants that control governing at a higher level.
The experimenters formed an idea, what they call a perceptual hypothesis. This is where it gets interesting. They hypothesize that the perceptual hypothesis are demands on an organism such as learning a new task, or acquiring a need. If the perceptual hypothesis if fulfilled with things like love, food, fame, or money etc then the perceptual hypothesis will become fixated. Fixation leads to accentuation, where the normal object (love, food, money) becomes highlighted, more vivid, or even bigger in apparent size.
30 ten year olds were asked to memorize coin sizes and relate them in size to a rotating circle inside of a box, the circle could be adjusted to proper circumference by aid of a knob on the outside.
The same experiment was done with cardboard disks on the control group.
Results: Coins were judged to be apparently larger in size than they actually were. Also, the higher the coin value, the larger the error of judgment went. The control group was considerably closer to actual size. This says that coins do have some sort of behavioral determination power because the coins hold social value.
The second experiment was done with two groups, rich children and poor children. The result of this experiment found that poor children thought coins to be larger in apparent size than rich children.
This shows that behavioral determinants do have an impact on perception.
This relates a lot to what we have discussed in class about perception of the world around you. It emphasizes that certain individuals will perceive the world differently than other individuals.
3. I found the perceptual hypothesis to be extremely interesting. The hypothesis pokes at the impetus of life. We are driven by systematic response tendencies that, if rewarded, grow stronger and become fixated and accentuated. Does that small perception of fame reward a tendency, and if so, does it grow stronger and fixate/accentuate? Then you realize that you're name on the marquee sign becomes more grandiose and highly valued? It's like a gambler, down on his luck, hitting the jackpot. His behavior is rewarded, even though he's still down after the winnings, he's fixated on hitting that other jackpot. The pot becomes more elusive and accentuated, if only he could just hit it one more time!
4) This study is historically important because it proves that perception has much to do with psychology. This is contrary to Watson's belief when he says only observable behaviors should be considered with merit. Here we have a study, with a solid empirical background, that can stand up to Watson's argument.
5) The book goes into great detail about perception and the biological aspects of it. It doesn't really try to encompass perception as an introspective idea.
6) autochthonous, behavioral, determinants, perception, empirical hypothesis, perceptual hypothesis, fixation, accentuation
Perception: An introduction to the Gestalt-theorie
Kurt Koffka (1922)
1) I chose this article based solely on my interest in how individuals see patterns (including the basic properties of the gestalt theory such as proximity, symmetry, similarity, and closure. Another reason I am fond of the Gestalt school of thought is because there are multiple interpretations of a single stimulus and that is intriguing to me.
2) Due to personal short-comings, my class attendance has been sketchy at best. My ability to say what was discussed in lecture is limited, but I can discuss the article itself briefly. The article didn't take the route I thought it would. I had anticipated that it would discuss the basic properties mentioned in the first paragraph initially, it did not however. It starts by briefly covering three crucial concepts to Gestalt psychology; sensation, association, and attention.
Sensation in the sense of this article is described as a stimulus that causes an arousal in our consciousness. Association has much to do with our memory and recall of sensations or previous experiences we have had with any given stimulus. The third concept mentioned is attention. As far as attention goes, I can't understand a single word that the author is trying to get across. If there's someone that can clarify it a bit for me amazing, maybe I'm just interpreting it incorrectly. It does, however, appear that all three of these concepts are intertwined and are reliant on the existence of the others.
3) I was very interested that even back when consciousness and attention were relatively NEW ideas, people still tried to give them concrete definitions even though people really weren't (and still aren't) entirely sure how they work. It's fascinating to me that our mind creates these patterns and then systematically and sorts out which stimuli are important on a situation by situation basis.
4) The text describes the Gestalt theory as the "perceptual whole is more than the sum of its sensory parts." Personally, I interpret this to mean that when you experience something, there's more to the experience than just your senses can provide. Most of the text describes the grouping properties (similarity, proximity, symmetry, and connectedness. However, in a later chapter the textbook tries to give a more concrete definition of attention than the article was willing to offer. The text doesn't describe attention as a single entity, but more as our brain selectively interpreting incoming data. Our mind can focus on one or several stimuli, and ignore others. It doesn't appear to be a measurable unit, it seems as if it just is (much like the concept of consciousness).
5) This is an important article to the history of psychology because it gives an abstract perspective on sensation, attention, and association that people just hadn't really put much thought into. Gestalt psychology, though it never really caught on as a widely accepted school of thought in its time period, is important to sensation and perception because all of the concepts in it directly relate to how people, in general, interpret data.
6) Sensation, Perception, Attention, Association, Gestalt Psychology, Stimuli, Principles of Grouping: Similarity; Proximity; Connectedness; and Symmetry,
Jerome S. Bruner & Cecile C. Goodman. Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception (1947) Harvard University
1. I chose this particular article because I saw it had the fewest number of pages to read and I thought it was an easier read than some of the other articles I looked over. Some of the other articles had words that I had no recollection of which would make it very difficult for me to understand the content that it was trying to purvey. One of the main reasons why I chose this one was because the title of the article sounded intriguing due to the fact that Value and Need are important factors in analyzing perception. Also I thought it would do the reader some justice by tying in to how we construct everything we see and don’t see.
2. This article is basically talks about understanding the process of perception and how different variables can have an effect on our perception. This can be a positive or negative thing as well. The Researchers wanted to apply and test two types of perceptual determinants which were behavior and autochthonous. Behavioral determinants consisted of factors such as the laws of learning and motivation, personality dynamics, social needs and attitudes, and many other ones. By implementing these factors, it demonstrates the role of reward and punishment in altering perceptual organization. Autochthonous determinants reflect the characteristic electrochemical properties of sensory end organs and nervous tissue. Two systematic matters the research used were perceptual compromise and perceptual equivocality. It is said that the greater the equivocality the greater the chance for behavioral factors in perception to operate. There were multiple hypotheses they were trying to test. 1. The greater the social value of an object, the more it will be susceptible to organization by behavioral determinants. 2. The greater the individual need for a socially valued object, the more marked will be the operation of behavioral determinants. 3. Perceptual equivocality will facilitate the operation of behavioral determinants only in so far as equivocality reduces the operation of autochthonous determinants without reducing the effectiveness of behavioral determinants. The experiment was done on 30 ten-year-old children of normal intelligence. There were divided evenly into two experimental groups and one control group. Also there was an Apparatus present that was a rectangular wooden box which had a 5” square glass screen and a knob at the lower right hand corner. In the center was a circular patch of light and on the back was a 60-watt incandescent light shining through an iris diaphragm. Subjects individually sat in a chair which was in front of the screen on the box. They were told it was a game in which they had to make a circle of light on the box the same size as various objects they were shown or told about. Two series were run for these groups that consisted with 20 children. First they were asked to estimate the sizes of the coins from a penny-half dollar from memory. They did the ascending order then the descending order of values. This led to them making two judgments, one from open, the other from the closed position of the iris diaphragm. For the memory series, which used the same order of presentation, the coins were held towards the center of their left hands, at the level where the light circled. The control group had ten subjects. Instead of them using coins they used medium gray cardboard discs that were identical in size. Also money was not mentioned in this group.
The results stated that coins, the socially valued objects, were judged larger in size than the gray discs. Secondly the greater value of the coin, the greater is the deviation of the apparent size from actual size. There might have been some autochthonous reasoning for the half dollar being lower than the quarter because kids may not have understood the value of a half dollar. The differences between experimental groups and control were significantly different. On the second experimental, group they were divided into two component groups a rich/poor group. Rich group subjects were drawn from progressive schools in Boston which catered to the sons and daughters of business people. Poor group came from a settlement house from a slum area in Boston. This shows an interesting difference by the poor group overestimating the coins considerably more than the rich group. There was an interaction between the parameters of economic status and value of coins. It relates to what we have been learning because the experiment had to with the subjects constructing what they thought each coin was. They had to feel different textures shapes and sizes. These are all aspects that we use on a regular basis to construct certain objects.
3. I thought that dividing the experimental groups into two components was in fact intriguing because I didn’t think of social economic status as playing a major role in the study. Also looking at the control group and how they were given something totally different in which had nothing to do with money was appealing as well. I was also shocked to see how relevant the behavioral determinants were in the experiment. Another thing I found to be fascinating was the fact that we as humans mis-construct things that we are usually confident in especially various textures.
4.This article impacts psychology in many different ways. It utilizes a lot of the concepts from a variety of fields within psychology. The article talked about Cognition, Behavioral, Memory, and Sensation and Perception. By this article discussing those things, it does an excellent job applying different techniques and theories which makes it important in psychology.
5. My text talked pretty heavily about different variables of perception. It used the term haptic perception in which is derived from sensory receptor in skin, muscles, tendons and joints. This ties back into the article because this is what the subjects were relying on in constructing the different coins. They were using the perceptual process of multiple subsystems by incorporating their skin as a form of texture to assist in the construction process. It also went into how touch is an Action for perception. An interesting thing I found was a section entitled the what system of touch: Perceiving objects and their properties. It actually talked about the designers of coins and how important it is to be able to identify it in your pocket. It criticized the Susan B. Anthony coin because it felt too much like a quarter. This is a direct hit on the article because the subjects were having a difficult time making the distinction of a half dollar and a quarter. In thinking about this, I realized that this is a key mechanism that blind people use and how they have to be able to construct quickly and accurately.
6. Behavioral determinants, autochthonous determinants, perceptual compromise, perceptual equivocality, haptic perception, sensory receptor,
Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception (1947)
Jerome S. Bruner and Cecile C. Goodman[1]
Harvard University
1) After skimming through a couple of the articles I chose Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception, by Jerome S. Bruner and Cecile C. Goodman. I choose this article because it was one of the shortest reads, it was one of the easier articles to understand, and the title really jumped out at me. I figured that this article would definitely relate to class and would help me understand the constructs of perception a little bit better.
2) This article is about perception and the factors that affect perception. This article starts out by explaining pervious research and the formation of how this research experiment started. One of the first things that stuck out to me was a professor describing perception and how we think of it as isolated, but we really should think of it in terms of interdependence. He stated we need “to understand how the process of perception is affected by other concurrent mental functions and how these functions in their turn are affected by the operation of perceptual processes.” In other words we need to look at perception as interdependent of many different variables, and look at all of these functions together to see how they affect one another and how we perceive things. This thought that perception is affect by many different functions is the basis of their research experiment.
The research experiment has three hypothesis, 1) The greater the social value of an object, the more will it be susceptible to organization by behavioral determinants. It will be selected perceptually from among alternative perceptual objects, will become fixated as perceptual response tendency, and will become perceptually accentuated 2) The greater the individual need for a socially valued object, the more marked will be the operation of behavioral determinants and 3) perceptual equivocality will facilitate the operation of behavioral determinants only in so far as equivocality reduces the operation of autochthonous determinants without reducing the effectiveness of behavioral determinants. The study had 30 ten year old subjects divided into three groups two experimental and one control. The children were individually shown different sizes of circles and they were asked to draw the size of the circle they saw on the screen. The two experimental groups received the same treatment. The child was first asked to estimate the sizes of coins from a penny through a half dollar from memory. The control group of ten subjects did the same procedure only with medium gray cardboard discs instead of coins, and not mention of money was mentioned to his group. They found that coins were judged larger than the gray discs, probably because they are socially valued objects, and the greater the value of the coin the greater the deviation was from the actual size of the to the perceived size of the coin. The two experimental groups were 10 rich kids and the other was 10 poor kids, the poor group overestimated the size of the coins considerably more than the rich group did, the assumption is that poor kids have a greater need for the money therefore they put more emphasis on the coins. These findings are extremely significant. It shows that other things affect perception such as socioeconomic status.
Perception is defined in the text book as interpretation of sensations, involving meaning and organization. This definition does hit on the big aspects of perception such as interpreting through meaning and the organization of perception; however, it doesn’t hit on the “value” part of perception that is a focus of this study. This relates to the things we are reading in the reader in the text in many ways. The reader shows many examples of pictures that can be interpreted in two ways. It would be interesting to know if they two ways it can be interpreted can be affected by love, socioeconomic status, moods, etc. For example, if someone in love sees a picture one way first and if someone who is angry sees the picture a different way. The books also focus on the fact that how we remember objects and how we see objects can be completely different.
3) What I found interesting about this article was when they said we should look at the nature of perception in everyday life and described this as how perception varies when one is hungry, in love, in pain, or solving a problem. I expect them to say how our mental processes affect perception, but I never expected them to focus on the emotional processes. However, I find the fact that they focused on this extremely interesting. It makes complete sense that we should focus on emotions and how they affect perception; someone in love may see things differently than someone who is depressed or angry. This is a very interesting concept.
4) This study is definitely important to the history of psychology, because it completely redefines what was formerly thought about perception. People use to think of perception as an isolated concept. After, this study it showed that perception is interdependent on many different functions, and can be affect by many different things.
5) The text describes the differences between sensation and perception as “fuzzy”. There is not a clear cut distinction between the two and often times we interpret the incoming stimuli so rapidly that sensations become perceptions almost immediately. If I had read this before I read the article it would have meant something completely different to me. I would have thought of interpreting things as such a thing that goes on in the mind not emotions.
6) Terms: sensation, perception, interdependent, functions, emotional processes, and perceptual processes.
Attitudes and Cognitive Organization
Fritz Heider
1) The major reason that I picked this article was because it is under social psychology. I've applied to a couple social psychology grad schools and have found this area of psychology interesting since I have declared psychology my major. Plus the name of the article was Attitudes and Cognitive Organization, which I thought would relate to this class.
2) The article turned out to be pretty confusing, they used a bunch of letters to try and represent the information as I read on I found myself scrolling up a lot trying to remember what letter was supposed to represent what action. I think that the main way it might relate to the class is how they talk about attitudes towards persons and different events people attend and how they have either a negative or positive outcome of the event attended. Its a stretch but in the article it talks about how a persons attitudes towards an event might differ based off of the person who brought you or told you to come to the event. How I think this could relate to sensation and perception would be that maybe you hold some peoples opinions higher than others so going into an event with a highly trusted person you may give the event more of a chance compared to if it is some random person telling you to come down and watch a presentation. So if you have a high regard for the person that told you to watch a certain thing you will try to give the material more of a chance and get more out of it. The actual hypothesis of the study was trying to understand if an attitude is either positive or negative based off of the relationship with the person compared to an impersonal entity.
3) Again the article was a hard read but it was interesting to read about how you will give something more of a chance because of who suggested the event compared to if it was someone who didn't mean anything to you. One of the examples they used was a father trying to get his son to like what he likes, which normally their children will look up to their father so it is not hard to convince. I would have never thought about the importance of an event could be based off of who told you to go to it.
4) It shows the importance of gaining a perspective or knowledge on a subject that you would have never otherwise given a shot. This type of study could be related to education also, having one faculty member tell the other to go to a guest speaker and based on the relationship of the two faculty members they might choose to go or not to go. Its a way of wanting to learn what others around you know and be able to keep up with them and interact in either an academic level or just being able to carry a conversation with a good friend who suggested a certain kind of music. Its an important way of looking how well word of mouth really spreads certain ideas and situations.
5) In my book it talks about the importance of phoneme and how just saying something a certain way could change the whole meaning of the word and its importance. The book also talks about how speech perception works with different patterns or pressure changes created by the speaker and how they are transformed directly into phonemes by the listeners auditory system. This way the speaker is able to understand what he or she wants to out of the conversation. The textbook shows us how people communicate it didn't necessarily go into the depth of how people will hold onto different peoples opinions or value others ideas. But it talked a lot about the way people communicate and how certain syllables can change a whole conversation.
6) Phoneme, hypothesis, auditory system, attitudes, speech perception
Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception
1) I picked this article because I thought it would be the shortest and easiest read of all the articles. I also thought that is seemed interesting.
2) The article talked about two ways of thinking which are autochthonous and behavioral. First they talked about the autochthonous point. The autochthonous perception is the predictable and characteristic responses. The authors say that this behavior is primal and chemical. Next we look at the behavioral perception. This says that we are control by more adaptive behaviors.The experimenters formed a perceptual hypothesis. They hypothesize that the perceptual hypothesis is learning a new task, or acquiring a need. If the perceptual hypothesis if fulfilled then it leads to fixation. Which can lead to the object of the fixation to seem bigger in size and more impartant than it actually is. The first experiment was 30 ten year olds memorized coin sizes and relate them in size to a rotating circle inside of a box. They did the same experiment with cardboard disks on the control group. The resuls were coins were judged to be apparently larger in size than the cardboard disks. They also found that the larger the coin value the larger the margin of error was. They thought that this had to do with the social importance that money holds. Experiment two was done with a group of rich kids and a group of poor kids and the rich kids estimated the coins smaller than the poor kids. This shows that behavioral determinants do have an impact on perception. This relates to what we have said in class about how people will view the world differently according to thier own environments and social factors.
3) I didn't find this article as interesting as I thought it would be in the beginning and the results were not surprising. I do think that it is because this is something that I already knew or believed myself however.
4)I think this is an important classic because it begins to address social factors in behavior and just how they affect things.
5) I could not find much in my text about this article.
6) autochthonous, behavioral, determinants, perception, perceptual hypothesis, fixation
On the perception of incongruity:n a paradigm
by Jerome S Bruner and Leo Postman, 1949
1- I picked this title for the simple reason that it sounded interesting... and it seemed to be a reasonable number of pages in length.
2- this article relates to class in a few ways. the study looks at our visual expectations and discusses how we can in certain situations construct what we assume we will see at times when our expectations do not match what we are seeing. the research looks at how people respond when shown a brief glimpse of a playing card. some of these cards were standard playing cards, and some participants were also shown cards that had the color (black or red) switched. the research showed that those who were shown the "normal" cards needed shorter time to recognize the card, and those who were shown the altered cards needed longer exposure to be able to process what they were seeing. the results were interesting, and a bit entertaining. a few of those who were shown the altered color cards had such difficulty with processing what they were seeing that they became frustrated, couldn't recognize what they were looking at, and had difficulty reconciling what they saw and what they expected to see. one finding was that those who were repeatedly exposed to the altered cards had less difficulty recognizing them, as if the exposure to altered cards made them more of a normal to those subjects.
3- the participants who became very frustrated and were unable to recognize the cards reminded me of a story i had heard. the story goes that when the first boats of europeans began to arrive on the shores of america the indians who lived here could not see the boats. they could see that the waves were moving as if there was something there, but because they could not imagine the existance of a ship large enough to cross the ocean they simply didn't have the ability to process what they were seeing. when i first heard this story i thought it was way too far fetched to be believable. now that i've learned a bit more about vision and perception, it makes more sense that something being in my visual field does not automatically mean my brain will let me see it. i thought it was neat that some participants took more of a compromising route by saying the cards seemed a bit funny, or the red seemed a bit dark when it was really black, or that the colors seemed to flash between black and red.
4- to me this seems like one of those studies that is important because of all the research that could follow. this was done with cards, an easily recognizable object with few aspects to alter. to simply change a card from red to black is a minor alteration but still had such a profound effect on the participants ability to correctly identify the card. so what happens when we change other things? will people still view a stop sign as red if we change it to purple, blue, or beige? how about if we make a fuzzy car. will people notice the texture? because this was the first study of this kind it's hard to tell if the researchers really knew the extent of their findings and what sorts of new ideas could come from the knowledge they provided.
5- the text book doesn't go into any account that really matches up with this research. however, there is a section on percieving objects in stages that goes into detail on how we first recognize objects and describes the illusory conjunction technique by Ann Triesman. she proposes that we first perceive what is called a primitive... line ends, movement, tilt, color, curvature, closed areas, brightness, and contrast. the second stage is where we put these together, and where we may make mistakes. when participants are shown flashes of a green square and follow with a red circle they may report back that they saw a green circle and a red square. Triesman believes this shows that these primitives are initially processed independently. as she says, curvature and redness are processed separate, and therefore these things may be incorrectly combined when the stimuli are flashed briefly. this is not the same as being faced with a stimulus that conflicts with our expectations, but may help to explain why some participants could correctly identify the suit or number of the cards, but not always the color at the same time. suit, color, and number are three separate primitives to be exposed to. the expectation of a three of hearts to be red may have overridden the fact that the card was really black, our minds may misinterpret these primitives if a certain threshold of exposure is not met.
6- perception, incongruity, visual construction, recognition, compromise, dominance, disruption, threshold, illusory conjunction technique, primitives
1) I chose this article because it seemed like it would be particularly interesting following the presentation by Dr. Maclin on February 23rd “How our Brain Lies to Us”, and I wanted to see the way that history has contributed to the understanding of this phenomenon of our sensory systems.
2) This article is about how our expectations of visual information operate to inform or misinform us about the visual information we receive. The authors of this study have mixed normal face cards with “trick” cards that have the colors reversed, such as black diamonds and red clubs. The researchers test subjects with multiple exposures until they correctly identify what they are seeing. The authors found that it took more exposures with the trick cards until the subjects correctly identified the visual information, and no longer failed to accurately perceive the mis-colored cards which were incongruous to their expectations – multiple exposures made them get used to the difference to the point where the subjects had “insight” and described the cards rather than ignoring or misidentifying or “resisting” the information about what was wrong with the trick cards.. (J.S. Bruno & L. Postman, 1949).
In the presentation, Dr. M, discussed, among many other things, the video of the unseen gorilla – wherein we are focusing on seeing the players in white, and discounting other important input that we do not expect – or that is not relevant to our attentional requirements. The classics article says of this that when we miss an environmental sensory input it is because “the observer is attentive to the task and that he is seeking to judge in terms of some required sensory dimension and not some other” (Bruno, & Postman, 1949).
3) Some of the most interesting things about this article were the ways in which humans are bound to our expectations until, through repeated exposure; our brains begin to allow the input of new and unexpected information. It is also fascinating to see the earlier development of the concepts and terminology we are learning about in class by reading this classic study.
4) I think this article is an important classic in the history of psychology because it was among the foundational studies in understanding the concepts that we are learning about in our Sensation and Perception class. It illustrates concepts and ideas that are still very relevant and illuminating to our understanding today, even if the vocabulary has evolved.
5) The texts cover this topic in a number of ways. For example, the textbook talks about inattentional blindness, which “occurs when a stimulus that is not attended is not perceived” (Golstein, B. 2007). It also shows a picture of a single frame of the same video that Dr. M discussed in his presentation – with the gorilla quite obviously standing in the middle of the frame. Also, the text talks about change blindness, which is analogous to the articles description of resistance to new stimuli. When something changes discordantly with our expectations, we simply do not see it upon initial exposures.
Meanwhile, the reader constantly illustrates the concept of our visual attention through information such as the visual illusions. Time and again we learn that our brain can easily ignore irrelevant details that would only confuse us and slow down our efficiency in processing the information that is relevant according to our evolutionary heritage. There are so many examples of this in the reader it is difficult to pick just one or two, but some of the most familiar include the illusions such as the subjective contours found in artwork going back to the Paleolithic era, the devils triangle, and the rabbit/duck as shown both in the reader and in the presentation by Dr. M (Hoffman, D. 1998).
6) Incongruity, sensory dimension, attention, inattentional blindness, change blindness, selective attention, resistance, insight.
1. I picked the article "The Experimental Psychology Laboratory at the University of Madison. I read this one because no one that I saw had read it so far. Also when looking through the articles, when I opened this one up, it said it was from the first issue of a journal and I thought it would be kind of interesting to read something that was published when psychology publications were first being started.
2. This article was about a psychology lab in Chicago in the 1890's. Joseph Jastrow was the person who founded this lab and this article was mainly about the study he was trying to do to collect as much new data as possible. The article then goes on to list 26 items of the methods of this study, which took two hours, and what they were trying to gain knowledge about. This article relates to class because it is a class about the senses and out of the tests that they ran on the participants, a lot of them had to deal mainly with a person's sense of touch and also with a person's visual perception. Other tests also dealt with memory. One of the tests that I thought related a lot to our class was one of the last ones mentioned in the article was the showed the participant 9 numbered squares, each with a different shade of grey, and then the person was given another square with a certain shade of grey and were asked to tell which of the numbered squares it resembled. This is very similar to the color shuffle that we talked about in chapter 5 of the reader and shows how a colors surrounding can affect your own perception of that same exact color. Emphasis was also put on performing tests that had to do with both a person's visual perception and memory by asking them to replicate a line of a certain length or to make a mark where an 'X' had previously been in the center of a piece of paper. I think this would be pretty hard to do, because it is hard to determine where exactly something was or how long a line is by memory.
3. I thought it was interesting that one of their experiments tested pain tolerance. The participants of these experiments were often individuals who were just visiting the exhibition and decided to do the experiment. They found that men could take more unpleasantness than women chose to endure. Today, I think that it would be difficult to be able to do an experiment involving pain and then I think that today people would want to be compensated for having to endure it. Back then, the participants paid to attend this exhibition that this lab was a part of and they wanted to get their money's worth, according to the article, so they were happy to participate, even when it meant they had to spend two hours in the lab and go through some pain.
4. This article is important, because prior to these findings, not much had been put out in terms of physiological psychology. The experimenter wanted to get a lot of data for further research based on the findings of many different experiments.
5. One test that was done tested sensitivity to certain stimuli. With this test, a persons arm was poked a couple times, and they tested to see when the person could notice a difference in where they were being poked at. I have learned about this in previous classes as just noticable differences, but in my text it called them difference thresholds. A difference threshold is the smallest difference between two stimuli that can be detected by a person. In the text it gave the example of a person doing this with weight, but it can also be done as it was done in the article with applying pressure to a part of the body. It is not surprising that a person can more easily detect large differences in weight or space than in smaller differences. This was first measured by Ernst Weber.
6. Terms: Visual Perception, Color Shuffle, Pain Tolerance, Physiological Psychology, Difference Threshold, Ernst Weber
1.) I read the article, The Experimental Psychology Laboratory at the University of Madison. As I was looking through the articles I read a little bit about each one and decided that this article seemed very interesting out of the ones that I read through. It was an older experiment so I thought that might be interesting to read about also.
2.) The laboratory was conducted by a man named Joseph Jastrow and took place in Chicago. There were 26 different studies that focused on: judging estimation, weight, sensitivity, roughness of surfaces, motor aptitudes, muscular sense, lines of given lenghts, reliable control, division of lengths, appreciation of lengths, aptitude to perceive differences in lenth, rapidity of perception and finesse, extent of memory, physical and physiological processes, reaction time to sound, light and touch, speed of perception and vicacity of memory, and the visual sense. These 26 tests took two hours to do and the knowledge that was gained was day to day usable information. Each subject was given a notecard that had notes, errors, and the recording of how he/she did on each test. Some of the tests in this article related to some of the things that we have been learning in class. One experiment which tests the reaction time to sound, light, and touch, measures the time it takes the subject to indicate that they have seen a white dot on a black screen, felt a small tap on the back of their hand, or heard the sound of a bell. Sensation and perception is all about sounds, light, and touch so this test can really relate to class. I think that I have pretty good reaction time, but I think it would be fun to do these tests to see how good I really am at it, along with so many of the other experiments that test different things.
3.) I found this article interesting because of the number of experiments that there were. I think that some articles can get really boring if only one or two things are being tested, but this article really kept my attention because of the 26 tests. The test that I found the most interesting was the memory test because I love the game memory. This test had the subjects look at a screen where there were cards displaying words and numbers. Then they were asked to write down all of the words and numbers that they remembered seeing in the exact order that they were. I think this would be tough, especially trying to keep the order correct.
4.) I think this was an important article to the history of psychology because it explained physiological psychology and came up with a lot of data that is very relevant to the human brain and body and can be used day to day.
5.) The text and the article can relate in many ways because of the variety of topics such as perception, memory, reaction time to sound, light, and touch, and physiological processes. It is hard to find exact examples though because the book goes into much more depth about topics and the article only has two to three sentences for each test just explaining the procedure and displpaying some statistics. As I was reading through the chapters of the text I did come upon two studies that are practically the same as the article! One study was a woman and her reaction time to light, and the other study was a woman shown a variety of words on a paper for 20 seconds and then she had one minute to write down all of the words she remembered.
6.) physiological processes, perception, sound, light, touch, light, memory, visual sense,
1) The article I picked was How Psychology failed? By Joseph Jastrow. I picked this article because the title made me kind of mad but still made me interested to see how it failed.
2) The article examined the science of Psychology over the years and talked about the different genera. It first talked about how and when Psychology became credited as a science and evaluated is it could still be considered one. The article gave a reason to why it became a science which was that experiments consume a majority of the professions time. It proceeded to evaluate Behaviorism, Psychoanalysis and Freudianism. The rest of the article touches on other aspects of the science (text books, etc...). Judging by the way it was written I would say the author dose not think it should be called a science. The article had very little to do with the material in the class.
3) I did not find much interesting about this article. Overall it made me a little mad because it seemed like the author just gave his personal point of view on the topic of Psychology.
4) I feel that it shows how critiqued Psychology really is and it attributes to making Psychology a science.
5) The text did not say much about what was in the article. There might have been a couple of mentions of Psychologists but over all not much.
1) I chose the article Significant Aspects of Client-Centered Therapy because the title intrigued me. It sounded like an article that would interest me and be very informative.
2) First of all this article talked about the predictable process of client-centered therapy. This experience which releases the growth forces within the individual will come about in most cases if the following elements are present: 1.If the counselor operates on the principle that the individual is basically responsible for himself, and is willing for the individual to keep that responsibility. 2. If the counselor operates on the principle that the client has a strong drive to become mature, socially adjusted. independent, productive, and relies on this force, not on his own powers, for therapeutic change. 3. If the counselor creates a warm and permissive atmosphere in which the individual is free to bring out any attitudes and feelings which he may have, no matter how unconventional, absurd, or contradictory these attitudes may be. The client is as free to withhold expression as he is to give expression to his feelings. 4.If the limits which are set are simple limits set on behavior, and not limits set on attitudes. (This applies mostly to children. The child may not be permitted to break a window or leave the room. but he is free to feel like breaking a window, and the feeling is fully accepted. The adult client may not be permitted more than an hour for an interview, but there is full acceptance of his desire to claim more time.) 5.If the therapist uses only those procedures and techniques in the interview which convey his deep understanding of the emotionalized attitudes expressed and his acceptance of them. This under standing is perhaps best conveyed by a sensitive reflection and clarification of the client's attitudes. The counselor's acceptance involves neither approval nor disapproval. 6.If the counselor refrains from any expression or action which is contrary to the preceding principles. This means reframing from questioning, probing, blame, interpretation, advice, suggestion, persuasion, reassurance. If these conditions are met. then it may be said with assurance that in the great majority of cases the following results will take place. 1. The client will express deep and motivating attitudes.
2. The client will explore his own attitudes and reactions more fully than he has previously done and will come to be aware of aspects of his attitudes which he has previously denied. 3.He will arrive at a clearer conscious realization of his motivating attitudes and will accept himself more completely. This realization and this acceptance will include attitudes previously denied. He may or may not verbalize this clearer conscious understanding of himself and his behavior. 4. In the light of his clearer perception of himself he will choose, on his own initiative and on his own [p. 417] responsibility, new goal which are more satisfying than his maladjusted goals. 5. We will choose to behave in a different fashion in order to reach these goals, and this new behavior will be in the direction of greater psychological growth and maturity. It will also be more spontaneous and less tense, more in harmony with social needs of others, will represent a more realistic and more comfortable adjustment to life. It will be more integrated than his former behavior. It will be a step forward in the life of the individual. Secondly, the article discusses how important it is to find the discovery of the capacity of the client. In order to heal and get through to the client, you need to help the client discover themself. Lastly, this article dissuses the improtance of the therapeutic relationship between the therapist and the client. Unlike other therapies in which the skills of the therapist are to be exercised upon the client. in this approach the skills of the therapist are focussed upon creating a psychological atmosphere in which the client can work. If the counselor can create a relationship permeated by warmth, understanding, safety from any type of attack, no matter how trivial, and basic acceptance of the person as he is, then the client will drop his natural defensiveness and use the situation. This article doesn't necessarily pertain this class in general however; it does pertain to the psychological field and is a significant article to have read as a Psychology major.
3) I found it interesting how this article compared Client-Centered therapies to other therapies and how it demonstrated the importance of Client-Centered therapies.
4) I think understanding the importance of client-centered therapy is an intricate part of being a Psychology major as well as a potential future psychologist/psychiatrist and I think that this is an important classic in the history of psychology because it's a very complex phenomenon that has explains a different side to psychology and therapy in general.
5) My text didn't go into any detail about types of therapy therefore; I can't elaborate on another person's opinon. However; it would have been interesting to see someone who would have gone into another direction with client-centered therapy so that I could have compared the two scholar's opinions/answers.
6) Client-Centered therapy, capacity of client, therapeutic relationship,
1) Elements of Psychophysics: Sections 7 and 16 by Fechner. I picked this article because it was the oldest one available and I wanted to get an idea of how differently we talk about sensation now as opposed to its original sources like Weber and Fechner.
2) This article discusses the Weber-Fechner law in some detail. The basic law is one in psychophysics which deals with the amount of change necessary in a stimulus before an observer notices the change. It is most easily understood in terms of weight, light, and sound changes. The law is in the form dy=KdB/B, where B is the original stimulus, dB is the small change in B, K is a constant, and dy is the sensation associated with the stimulus B. Naturally when the stimulus and change in stimulus stay constant so does the sensation. With basic mathematics we can see that the larger the initial stimulus (B) the larger the change in the stimulus (dB) can be (must be, really), and still result in the same sensation (dy). This means that the larger the initial intensity of a stimulus (weight, pitch, loudness, brightness, etc.) the larger must be the change in that stimulus before the change is noticeable by the observer.
It is hard to imagine a historical paper more pertinent to the present course than one like this. It really lies at the heart of sensation and perception, providing one of the building blocks of all future research on the issue.
3) The interesting thing about math is that so much can be revealed from sometimes incredibly small formulas. He mentions briefly towards the end that due to the logorhythmic nature of the law, positive values of y (the sensation) are associated with conscious experiences and negative values with unconscious experiences. Most of the modern theories of consciousness still posit this same idea that something about consciousness is a ‘threshold’ which has been reached. The question would be what causes some things to tip the scale over the threshold but so much else not too and in this regard the Weber-Fechner law still has a lot to offer in regards to future research. It’s amazing to me that such a simple mathematical formula derived from experiments which were probably originally as simple as having someone hold weights in their outstretched hands while blind-folded, have implications for the nature of consciousness.
4) This is a classic first for reasons already discussed, that it has withstood the test of time and still proves to be valid, useful, and parsimonious. Also I think it is a classic in the field for showing how far we have come. Fechner’s speech here is incredibly wrapped up in demonstrating that these findings are real, physical, observable, and scientific. Also you can see him being very careful not to postulate too much about the internal aspects of the mind. He is forward enough to say that the external psychological world of sensation, and the laws which govern it, must be saying something about ‘internal psychology’ but what it is saying they don’t know. Also he makes it clear that the ‘sensation’ part of the equation can be anything, we don’t have to know anything about what this mental sensation is like in order to still talk about it scientifically. He’s really paving the way for a more advanced science of psychology.
5) Our text basically expands on the ideas discussed in this article and makes them MUCH more easily understandable. Weber’s law is first introduced on pg 14 which indicates how important it is to the study of sensation and perception. Fechner originally studied the absolute threshold, which was the minimum amount of energy necessary in order for the stimulus to be detected. Weber’s insights into the ‘difference threshold’ was added to his own work when he published Elements of Psychophysics.
Figure 1.12 on pg 15 of our text is an amazing piece of information I think. It shows how magnitude estimation wasn’t accurately understood until the late 1950’s, and the graph shows the relationship between the estimated magnitude and the stimulus intensity for brightness, line length, and electric shock. Very quickly the response to brightness is called response compression because doubling of intensity is accompanied with only a small change in the perceived brightness; whereas the electric shock is an example of response expansion whereby the opposite is the case; doubling the intensity more than doubles the perceived shock. The line follows an almost perfectly linear path.
This makes evolutionary sense to me since we have the most experience with seeing lines so we ought to be very good at estimating the increase in magnitude as the physical stimulus of length is increased. Regarding the others the idea of Type 1 and Type 2 errors come to mind. It is beneficial for us to experience response expansion with potentially harmful stimuli such as electric shock. Conversely changes between light and dark are incredibly extreme for us (night and day for instance; but also dusk, dawn, fire and torchlight, etc.) so it would be better for us not to perceive as great a change in magnitude with changes in stimulus similar to the response compression. Imagine if a slight increase in light intensity caused a tripling or larger increase in perceived magnitude, we may not be able to live with such a wide range of light and dark. Subtle variations to this last part exist however, since it is better for us to notice incredibly subtle changes in movement at night, etc.
6) Weber-Fechner law, psychophysics, stimulus, sensation, perception, intensity, magnitude, absolute threshold, difference threshold, response expansion, response compression.