On a clear, dark night most of us can see a candle flame 30 miles away. True

1. On a clear, dark night most of us can see a candle flame 30 miles away. • True

2. Advertisers are able to shape our buying habits through subliminal messages. • False

3. Constant eye movements prevent our vision from being seriously disrupted. • True

4. The retina of the eye is actually brain tissue that migrates to the eye during early fetal development. • True

5. If we stare at a green square for a while and then look at a white sheet of paper, we see red. • True

6. People who live in noisy environments are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, anxiety, and feelings of helplessness. • True

7. Blind musicians are more likely than sighted ones to develop perfect pitch. • True

8. Touching adjacent cold and pressure spots triggers a sense of wetness. • True

9. People who are born without the ability to feel pain usually die by early adulthood. • True

10. Without their smells, a cold cup of coffee may be hard to distinguish from a glass of red wine. • True

11. Sensation & Perception

13. Sensation vs. Perception • Do you perceive a meaningful configuration? • Is it an amorphous blotch without meaning or organization? • Meaningless array of black and white and gray blotches. • Over time, we impose some organization upon the meaningless array we sense. • Might even hypothesize and test them to see if we are correct.

14. Read this sentence carefully and you will note some odd things about it. The marks you interpreted as the word is in the top line are exactly the same marks you interpreted as 15 in the phone number. Can you find the other examples of the same marks being interpreted two ways? Here is where sensation and perception come together. Sensation involves moving the image from the book to your brain, a bottom-up process of gathering environmental information through the senses. Perception involves knowing what to make of the individual marks in the sentence. This top-down interpretation relies on your experiences with, and expectations about, language.

15. Top-Down Processing • Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Our experience and expectations enable us to immediately perceive the scrambled letters as meaningful words and sentences.

16. Absolute Threshold • Sense receptors are remarkably sensitive. • Absolute Threshold – is the weakest amount of a stimulus that a person can reliably detect. • Will differ person to person • Subliminal – below one’s absolute threshold for conscious awareness.

17. Do I smell it or not? When stimuli are detectable less than 50 percent of the time, they are ""subliminal."" Absolute threshold is the intensity at which we can detect a stimulus half the time.

18. James Vicary – “subliminal advertising” • Ft. Lee NJ movie theater (1957) • Throughout the movie Picnic he flashed • “Drink Coca-Cola” and “Hungry? Eat Popcorn” • Sales increased 18% for Coke & 57% for popcorn

20. The legend • Vicary lied about his results • When asked to replicate his experiment, he produced no significant increase in popcorn or Coke sales. • Eventually he confessed that he falsified his experiments. Phenomenon stayed in pop culture. • http://www.subliminal-message.com/ • http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/09/13/ads/index.html

21. Sensation • How we detect physical energy in the environment & encode it as neural signals.. • Bottom up processing: Analysis that begins with the sense receptors and works up to the brain’s integration of sensory information.

22. Perception • How we select, organize, and interpret information. • Top down processing: Information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawing on our experience and expectations.

23. The Weed & the Weasel http://jeffmilner.com/backmasking.htm http://www.triplo.com/ev/reversal/

24. Subliminal Messages & Backward Masking • Perception of messages in backwards recordings is largely governed by our expectations. • Example of Top Down Processing • Constructing perceptions drawing on on our experiences and expectations

25. Subliminal Messages & Backward Masking • Consider what would happen if parents sat down and listened to backwards rock music expecting to to find references to drugs, sex and the devil. • Because there is great ambiguity in the recordings, they are likely to find what they are looking for. This does not mean the messages are really there.

26. Research on subliminal messages • No research to indicate that subliminal stimulation produces major changes in behavior even if it were present. • What about if it is present? • Disney’s Pollution of America’s Youth • http://komar.cs.stthomas.edu/qm425/fisher3.htm

27. http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lionking.htm - add

30. The Little Mermaid.

33. Difference Threshold – Just Noticeable Difference • Applies to each of our senses: the minimal differences between two stimuli that people can reliably detect. • In turning down load music your sister might say “I don’t hear any difference!” • You haven’t met her difference threshold.

34. Difference Threshold – just noticeable difference - • Weber’s Law – the size of the JND is proportional to the intesntity of the stimulus. • If the music is very LOUD, one will have to turn down the volume more compared to if the volume is very SOFT.

35. Difference Threshold – just noticeable difference • In this computer-generated copy of the Twenty-third Psalm, each line of the typeface changes imperceptibly. How many lines are required for you to experience a just noticeable difference?

36. Signal Detection Theory • Explains precisely how and when we detect the presence of a faint stimulus (signal) • Sensation depends on the characteristics of the stimulus, the background stimulation, and the detector. • Helps us explain why thresholds are variable. • Why do we get more out of a lecture when we have a cup of coffee? • Why do we notice a certain sound one time and not the next? • Why do notice things that go bump in the night when we are alone in the house?

37. Sensory Adaptation • Process by which sensory systems adapt to constant stimuli by becoming less sensitive to them. • Wearing a new ring vs. being married for 50 yrs. • Water in a lake / tub

38. Selective Attention • We can only attune to a limited number of things in our environment. • Selective attention or lack of it plays a major role in our lives. • Research finds there is a significant difference between the sexes. • Test – DO NOT SAY ANYTHING IF YOU HAVE SEEN THIS TEST!!!

39. Selective Attention ANOTHER TEST: As you stare at this Necker cube, providing fairly constant stimulation to your retina, your perception--and accompanying neural activity in your brain--will change every couple of seconds.