psych 372 environmental psychology (2 perception)

8/11/2019 Psych 372 Environmental Psychology (2 Perception)

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Environmental Perception



Perception matters

• Studies of perception constitute the oldest partof scientific psychology

• Most often, such studies relate to theperception of objects

• There is strong emphasis on vision becausewe are very visually dominant animals, but

other senses will assume importance too,especially hearing



An overview of vision

• A little bit about eyes

• Neuroanatomy of vision

• Separate processing streams for perceptionand action



The eye

First steps in seeing 4



The retina has two types of receptors



The human eye

Note that the receptors are in differentareas


http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/psych-372-environmental-psychology-2-perception 7/36The human eye

The retina is not much like a camera

Ophthalmoscope allows clinician to

look at state of retina

FoveaOptic

disk



The duplex retina

• Rods

• Very sensitive

• Found in most of the

visual field

• Colour-insensitive

• Cones

• Not very sensitive

• Capable of colour

vision

• Capable of resolvingfine detail (as aconsequence of how

they are wired)



Overall organization of visual system

9



Foveal magnification



Figure 4.2 The main visual areas ofthe macaque monkey cortex



Free viewing


http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/psych-372-environmental-psychology-2-perception 16/36How old are the people?



What was happening just prior?



Remember their clothing



How long had the visitor been away?



But consider this….

Louis Necker’s cube - 1824



Or how about this….



A little movement:



What’s really happening?



How do we cope with all of thisuncertainty?

• Gestalt principles



More formal models

• The buzz in traditional perception now issomething called the Bayesian approach

• Without slogging into details, it’s really muchthe same idea as was expressed less formallyby the Gestalt psychologists

• We make educated guesses because we cannotknow with certainty

• This should remind you of Egon Brunswik



The important points

• The retina is specialized for different types ofseeing

• We are only capable of detail vision with cone cells inthe fovea this is really a very small part of the visualfield

• We simply cannot see everything that is “out there”

• We need to make guesses based in part on our experiences andin part on the physics of the world

• Both traditional and modern views in perception lean strongly towardsthis view



What about environmentalperception?

• When we are looking at objects in scenes, weuse our powers of selective attention

• This can mean something quite obvious, such as

an overt orientation of the eyes and maybe thehead and the rest of the body

• So for example in the Yarbus images, we inferthat the pattern of eye movements reflects theway that we are attending to a scene



What do we do with scenes?

• Recent studies suggest that we are very fast andaccurate at processing scene information

• We are able to extract what is called the “gist” of

a scene without processing information aboutdetails



We probably rely on

coarse mathematical

features (called

ensemble statistics)to do this



In scene-based guidance, processingof scene gist works hand-in-glove

with selective attention



Environmental psychologists typicallygo even further to ask questions like:

• What is the meaning of what I see?

• What can I do with what I see?

• What are others doing with the environment Isee?

• How does the scene before me affect myemotions? My cognition?

psych 372 environmental psychology (2 perception)

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