PSYC 341 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: George Sperling, Iconic Memory, Visual Search

• School: University of Maryland
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 341
• Professor: michaeldougherty

Document Summary

Describe the effect of context on perception. Bottom up processing uses stimuli from the environment, and then that helps to make up the full picture. Top down processing is knowledge driven, using past knowledge to help with object recognition. If we reading a meaningful word, that makes more sense than a nonmeaningful word. We read sentences, and then we identify words based on the context of the sentence. During a visual (feature) search, an element that characterizes the target"s ability to stand out from surrounding distractors due to its unique feature. Visual search: a task requiring the observer to find a target in a visual display that has numerous distractors. More efficient when target appears frequently, if it differs from irrelevant objects on only one dimension (like color) aka isolation, and if a specific feature of the stimulus is present rather than absent. Perception model, specific perceptual patterns stored in memory. Does not fair well with complex shapes.