PSYCH 240 Lecture 2: Lecture 2 Notes
Document Summary
Illusory contours: perceiving something that is not really there: created by context surrounding image. How do we come to know the world: the nativist (a. k. a rationalist) position much of our knowledge is based on innately given characteristics. From this perspective, sensation and perception should be hard-wired : the empiricist position we are born as blank slates (tabula rasa). Thus, we must learn to sense and perceive. John locke: nature (innate) vs. nurture (experience) Big debate about how we learn the world. Many cues used by brain to form 3d world. Stages in perception: perception is always indirect. Distal proximal percept (final view: real world: distal stimulus (tree, some energy bounces off the tree and reaches our eyes. Image of the tree on our retina is the proximal stimulus: lots of processing of that proximal stimulus in our brains to get the final percept that we experience when we look at the tree.
