Gregory Perception revision mindmap

A summary of Gregory's theory of perception taken from a revision sheet we got in class. There are some empty bits but it's not meant to be in full detail anyway don't demand so much from me I'm only human #deep

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  • Gregory's Theory of Perception
    • Top Down theory
      • Perceptual abilities need to be learnt
        • We are born with very limited perceptual abilities
      • Through interactions with the environment we form hypotheses related to the processing of visual information e.g. we learn rules about depth cues
        • We then apply these hypotheses to new situations
          • Therefore past experiences, context and motivation all influence perception
    • Perceptual Constancies
      • Involves things being perceived as the same despite changes in the visual information we receive
      • Size constancy - objects at a distance are visually smaller
        • If we were perceiving directly from the environment we would take this information as face value, however we still perceive them as normal sized
      • Location constancy - despite head movements changing the flow of information across the retina, we still perceive the world as being stationary because the brain's motion detectors compensate
        • Generally if the whole visual field is moving we perceive that we are moving. If single objects in the visual field are moving, we perceive that they are moving
    • Perceptual Set
      • Bias to perceive some things rather than others
      • Brain is 'set' into perceiving things in certain ways due to factors e.g. past experience, context, motivation
    • Visual Illusions
      • Gregory's theory explains why humans are easily fooled by visual illusions
      • Happens due to the brain's tendency to create hypotheses to attempt to make sense of visual information
      • Many visual illusions arise from us attempting to apply hypotheses developed from looking at the 3D world to 2D drawings
      • Examples include the Ponzo illusion and the Muller Lyer
    • Evaluation of Theory (including IDA)
      • Heavily on the side of NURTURE - we LEARN perceptual abilities through experiences. Everyone would perceive the world slightly differently as we all have different visual experiences
      • If the Muller Lyer is shown to patients who have been blind from birth (sight restored), they see the lines as being the same length - someone who has never seen depth cues has no understanding of them so is not fooled by an illusion with suggested depth
      • Minturn and Bruner showed how context can cause perceptual set (ABC, 12 13 14)
      • Cross cultural studies
        • Turnbull found that Bambuti Pygmies who lived in dense forest had not developed size constancy as they did not have experience of looking at objects far away. When one of the tribe was taken out of the forest for the first time and saw buffalo grazing in the distance he thought they were insects
          • Suggests that size constancy develops through experience and is a learned ability
        • Hudson showed participants from different cultures a line drawing with various depth cues and asked them various questions (e.g. "what is the man doing?", "which animal is closest to the man?"). Non-Western people had difficulty seeing depth in pictures - perceived them in 2D rather than 3D
          • When the drawings were painted on cloth, which was more familiar to some cultures, there was more evidence of depth perception in non-Western participants, suggesting this was not a culture-fair test
          • When 'texture gradient' cyes were added, 64% of non-Western participants answered with 3D answers. When colour and haze around distant hills was added the figure rose to 76%.

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