Ch. 6 Perception Vocab

Selective attention: the focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus, as in the cocktail party effect.

Inattentional blindness: failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere.

Visual capture: the tendency for vision to dominate the other senses.

Gestalt: an organized whole. Gestalt psychologists emphasized our tendency to integrate pieces of information into meaningful wholes.

Figure-ground: the organization of the visual field into objects (the figures) that stand out from their surroundings (the ground).

Grouping: the perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into coherent groups.

Depth perception: the ability to see objects in three dimensions although the images that strike the retina are two-dimensional; allows us to judge distance.

Visual cliff: a laboratory device for testing depth perception in infants and young animals.

Binocular cues: depth cues, such as retinal disparity and convergence, that depend on the use of two eyes.

Retinal disparity: a binocular cue for perceiving depth: By comparing images fomr the two eyeballs, the brain computes distance- the greater the disparity (difference) between the two images, the closer the object.

Convergence: a binocular cue for perceiving depth; the extent to which the eyes converge inward when looking at an object. The greater the inward strain, the closer the object.

Monocular cues: depth cues, such as interposition and linear perspective, available to either eye alone.

Phi phenomenon: an illusion of movement created when two or more adjacent lights blink on and off in quick succession.

Perceptual constancy: perceiving objects as unchanging (having consistent lightness, color, shape, and size) even as illumination and retinal images change.

Perceptual adaptation: in vision, the ability to adjust to an artificially displaced or even inverted visual field.

Perceptual set: a mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another.

Human factors psychology: a branch of psychology that explores how people and machines interact and how machines and physical environments can be made safe and easy to use.

Extrasensory perception (ESP): the controversial claim that perception can occur apart from sensory input. Said to include telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition.

Parapsychology: the study of paranormal phenomena, including ESP and psychokinesis.

Check for any mistakes; I think I got all the words.