The document discusses concepts related to perception and cognition. It defines key terms like transduction, sensory memory, pattern recognition, schemas, categorical perception, and phonemes. It also describes processes like bottom-up and top-down processing, holistic and analytic processing in face perception, and spectrograms in speech perception. Examples are provided to illustrate concepts like categorical perception of speech sounds and prosopagnosia.

1. CHAPTER 2

2. • Conscious understanding of something.
• Our sensory experience of the world around us and
involves both the recognition of environmental stimuli and
actions in response to these stimuli.

3. • Means the conversion of one kind of energy into another
kind.
• Sensors in the body transform signals from the
environment into encoded neural signals.

4. • Refers to the transduction of physical energy, such as
sound waves or electromagnetic radiation, into an initial
mental representation that can be further processed and
transformed over time.

7. Is a narrow band of electromagnetic energy. The wavelengths of light
that may be sensed by the human visual system range from 400 to 700
nanometers.

8. • This light, in what is called
the visual field, is
structured in accordance
with the structures of the
objects themselves.
• The detection process
begins with the
transduction of
electromagnetic energy
by photoreceptor in the
retina of the eye.
• PHOTORECEPTORS are
neurons specialized to
convert visible light into
electrical signals that may
be propagated by the
neurons of the visual
system.

10. Part of the cerebral cortex responsible for processing visual information.

11. Is vision without awareness that can be observed in patients with
lesions in the occipital cortex.

12. • Refers to the step between the transduction and
perception of a stimulus in the environment and its
categorization as a meaningful object.

13. A stimulus can be perceived and understood in terms of its properties but
not recognized as a meaningful object.
Patients suffering from lesions in certain regions of the brain can see objects
but not recognize them at all.

14. An inability to recognize objects clearly from their shapes.

15. Refers to a failure of pattern recognition caused by an inability to
categorize objects at a perceptual level of analysis.

16. Is caused by an inability to categorize objects at a functional semantic
level of analysis.

17. • Is a mental representation that organizes knowledge
about related concepts.
• Organized knowledge representations or schemas direct
exploration of the environment to sample features of the
objects and events to be perceived.

18. • Reduce the need to sample all of the information
available in the environment by providing the perceiver
with expectations.
• Operate from the top down—from long-term memory to
sensory memory—to identify the stimulus.

19. • Analyze the edges, lines, areas of light and dark, colors,
sounds, and other physical features available briefly in
sensory memory.
• Operate from bottom up—from sensory memory to long-
term memory—to achieve the same goal.

21. • Refers to a single letter being recognized faster in the
context of a whole word than when presented as an
isolated letter.
• Examples: WORK (a word)
ORWK (a nonword)
K (a single letter)
Opponent
Challenged by a dangerous opponent
The political leader was challenged by a dangerous opponent.

22. • Refers to the
phenomenon
that people fail
to notice large
changes in
visual scenes.

23. • Differentiate objects during pattern recognition. Neural
cells in the occipital cortex are tuned to fire when
stimulated by simple lines presented at a particular
orientation.
• Example: searching for letter Z among T, L, K, M, V or
• O, Q, P, B, D

24. • Consider not just features,
but also the relations
among features, to
facilitate pattern
recognition.

25. • Refers to a set of processes that are automatic, fast,
encapsulated apart from other cognitive systems, and
instantiated in a localized area of the brain.

26. • Refers to perceiving
the whole object.
• Perception of faces is
unique in that it is
more strongly
influenced by holistic
processing than by
analytic processing.

27. • Refers to perceiving the features that compose the
whole.
• Analytic processing targets the nose, the eyes, the lips,
and other specific features instead of their relations.

28. • refers to an individual's
understanding and
interpretation of the face,
particularly the human
face, especially in relation
to the associated
information processing in
the brain.

29. • Is a selective inability to recognize
faces that does not involve other
kinds of vision difficulties.
• Example: A sheep farmer had no
problem in distinguishing
photographs of his own sheep from
pictures of other sheep despite their
close similarity in appearance. Yet
his recognition of human faces was
profoundly impaired.

30. • Is challenging because
the acoustic signal for
the basic sounds of
speech that
communicate
meaning—phonemes—
is highly complex.
• is the process by which
the sounds of language
are heard, interpreted
and understood.

31. • Represent the physical acoustic
energy of an utterance by
plotting frequency in hertz or
cycles per second on the y axis
and time in milliseconds on the
x axis.
• Figure 1: Spectrograms of
syllables "dee" (top), "dah"
(middle), and "doo" (bottom)
showing how the onset formant
transitions that define
perceptually the consonant [d]
differ depending on the identity
of the following vowel.
(Formants are highlighted by
red dotted lines; transitions are
the bending beginnings of the

32. • A speech sound or phonological segment that makes a
difference in meaning.
• Are coarticulated, meaning that each segment of the
acoustic signal provides clues about the identity of more
than one phoneme.

33. • A critical function of the speech processing module is the
categorization of speech input at the phonemic level, a
phenomenon called categorical perception.
• For example, /b/ and /p/ differ in terms of the amount of
time elapses between the release of the lips and the
onset of voicing.

34. Kellogg, R. T. (2007). Fundamentals of Cognitive Psychology. SAGE
Publications, Inc.