S2 exam revision

Person perception is the mental process of forming impressions and drawing conclusions about the personal characteristics of other people.

Internal attributions is when we assign the reason to a person's behaviour as something from within the individual

E.g. personality characteristics, motivation, ability and effort.

External attributions is when we assign the reason to a person's behaviour as something from outisde the individual (enviro)

E.g. their location or the people around them.

Heuristics: mental shortcuts we use to make quicker, more efficient decisions.

• Three types:
• Availability
• Representative
• Affect

The availability heuristic: a mental shortcut in which we use the information that we first think of to make a judgement. 

• ○uses information which is readily available or easy to imagine
• ○influenced by info that is recent, frequent, vivid or emotionally significant
• ○assumes that info that can be recalled easily must be significant or lead us towards a satisfactory response.

The affect heuristic: when decision making is influenced by an individual’s current emotional state or mood. 

• ○useful as it allows for decisions to occur quickly and efficiently
• ○can lead us to make decisions without taking the time to weigh up all relevant information
• ○leads us to make judgements about certain words, images and objects because of the emotional response they prompt.

• Benefits:
• - reduces cognitve load
• - allow snap judgements
• - saves time and mental effort

• Limitations:
• - susceptible to bias 
• - can be inaccurate

A group is formed when two or more people intereact, sharing a common objective and influencing each other

Attitudes: learned ideas we hold about ourselves, others, objects and experiences. Attitudes are not innate.

Prejudice: a negative belief or attitude held towards a group of people as a result of the group they belong to

Stereotypes: generalized views about the personal attributes or characteristics of a group of people

Discrimination: treating others in an unfair manner based on the negative attitude held about that person or the group to which they belong.

The tri-component model of attitudes: proposes that attitudes contain 3 main components (the ABC of attitude):

• ○Affective component
• ○Behavioural component
• ○Cognitive component

• - doesn't indicate strength of attitude
• - understanding strength useful as strong attitudes are generally firmly held, resistant to change and impact behaviour
• - inconsistencies between thinks and feels and their behaviour (cognitive dissonance)

Cognitive dissonance: discomfort experienced when our behaviours do not align with our attitudes or perception of ourselves.

• - Change cognition
• - Change behaviour: to suit dissonant coignition
• - Add new cognitions: to justify or rationalise behaviour

Obedience occurs when people change their behaviour in response to direct commands from others.

Conformity: changing behaviour as the result of real or implied pressure from others.

Anti-conformity: deliberate refusal to comply with social norms as demonstrated by ideas, beliefs or judgements that challenge these social norms.

• Superordinate goals
• Mutual interdependence
• Equality of status
• Changing social norms
• Sustained contact
• Intergroup contact

Superordinate goals: shared goals, which individuals cannot achieve without the cooperation of others.

Mutual interdependence: when individuals must rely on one another to meet each person’s goals, prejudice and discrimination is reduced.

Equality of status: involves social interaction that occurs at the same level, without obvious differences in power or status. Members of the in-group and outgroup interact with each other, but without one group exerting power over the other.

Changing social norms: Social norms are rules, standards or behaviours that are generally understood or accepted within society.

Sustained contact involves ongoing contact either directly or indirectly over a period of time.

Intergroup contact: When intergroup contact is increased between the people who hold the stereotype and those who are the target of the stereotype, prejudice is reduced.

In-group is a group of people who share common traits with you.

Out-group is a group of people who do not share common traits with you (or share traits that you percieve to be negative).

Collectivist cultures value group needs or interests over the interests of individuals.

Indivisualistic cultures value indicual interests over the interests of groups.

• Advantages of media advertising
• - health promotion advertising targets unhealthy or risky behaviour - smoking
• - stop individuals behaving a particular way 
• - healthier choices lead to improved mood and self-esteem
• - mental health support networks use platforms to promote their services

• Disadvantages of media advertising
• - portrayal of 'ideal bodies' in adverts lead to negative impacts on all genders
• - body dissatisfaction and exacerbate EDs
• - body dissatisfaction and emotions (depression, stress, low self-esteem)
• - negative change in eating behaviour

Sustained attention: focusing attention on an activity or stimulus over a prolonged period without being distracted by other stimuli.

e.g. watching a movie without pausing or going back to understand the plot

Selective attention: choosing to focus your awareness on a specific or limited range of stimuli while ignoring other stimuli.

e.g. focusing on what one person says and ignoring sounds of other conversations

Divided attention: refers to rapidly switching the focus of your awareness between two (or more) sources of information so you can perform two (or more) tasks at the same time.

e.g. driving while following directions from navigation system

Sensation: an automatic physical process that involves the bodys sensory receptors detecting and responding to external energy

Sensation is a process that involves three stages:

• 1.reception
• 2.transduction 
• 3.transmission.

Reception: involves sensory receptors taking in and being activated by the stimulus energy 

Detection of stimulus energy by sensory receptor cells of the various sense organs.

Transmission: Neural impulses leave their sensory receptor site and travel along neural pathways to specific sensory areas in the brain

Transduction: sensory receptors converting stimulus energy into electrochemical energy that can be transmitted to the brain as neural impulses

Perception: a psychological process that gives meaning to the stimuli our sense organs detect.

• Perception involves three stages:
• 1.selection
• 2.organisation
• 3.interpretation

Selection: Feature detector cells filter the impulses/stimuli by selecting some for further processing and ignoring others

Organisation: the brain assembles the selected impulses into a pattern or form that can be recognised

Interpretation: the brain gives meaning to the reassembled pattern or whole so we know what we have sense

Depth Cues

• Binocular depth cues: 
• - Retinal disparity
• - Convergence

• Monocular depth cues:
• - Accomodation
• - Pictorial cues

Binocular cues: depth cues that require both eyes to work together and provide the brain with information about depth and distance.

Monocular cues: depth perception cues that rely on information from only one eye.

Retinal disparity: is a binocular depth cue created by small differences between the image that reaches the right eye and the image that reaches the left eye

Convergence: binocular cue - involves both eyes simultaneously turning inwards as an object moves closer in order to maintain focus on the object .

Accommodation: monocular cue - the changing shape of the lens to maintain focus on objects of varying distances.

• When the object is close the lens is more rounded.
• When the object is further away the lens flattens

Pictorial cues: monocular cues present in 2D images that allow the brain to perceive apparent 3D depth.

• Types of pictorial cues:
• Linear perspective
• Relative size
• Interposition (overlap)
• Texture gradient
• Height in field

• Visual perception principles (Gestalt principles and visual constancies) 
• Context
• Motivation
• Past experiences
• Memory

Visual constancies: perception principles that allow us to view objects as unchanging in terms of their actual size, shape, brightness and orientation, even when there are changes to the image that the object casts on the retina.

• Size constancy
• Shape constancy
• Brightness constancy
• Orientation constancy

Context: refers to information (conditions or circumstances) that surrounds a stimulus that influences the perception of the stimulus.

Motivation: an internal state that activates, directs and sustains behaviour in relation to achieving a specific goal. Motivation can be either conscious or unconscious. 

• It can be influenced by:
• physiological factors (e.g. pain, hunger and body temperature)
• psychological and emotional factors (e.g. your interests, priorities and mood).

Past experience: prior exposure to stimuli and previous life experiences create a tendency, or expectation, to interpret stimuli in the same way as similar previous stimuli.

Memory: when interpreting a new stimulus, memories of past experiences are retrieved and compared to the new stimulus to help.

Humans recognise what they are looking at by combining current sensory stimuli with comparisons to images stored in memory.

Culture - Research suggests that cultural differences cause differences in visual processing.

• - some cultures used only selected pictorial cues to represent depth and perceive simplified drawings as flat, two-dimensional designs
• - People from Western societies perceived the same drawings in three-dimensions because they are trained from a very young age to perceive pictures in three-dimensions.

Gestalt principles: rules used to organise separate elements of a visual stimulus into meaningful patterns or whole forms.

• Figure ground 
• Closure
• Similarity
• Proximity

Figure–ground: applying an imaginary contour line to group and separate some features of a stimulus so that a part of the stimulus appears to stand out as an object (the figure) against a plainer background (the ground).

Closure: tendency to complete an incomplete figure by filling in an imaginary contour line so that the figure has a consistent overall form.

Similarity: The tendency to perceive stimuli that have similar visual features as belonging together and forming a meaningful whole.

Proximity: The tendency to perceive stimuli that are close together in space as belonging together and forming a meaningful whole.

• Genes
• - Genetic make-up influences the amount of and composition of gustatory receptors on taste buds
• - taste and general eating behaviour are controlled by our genes. 

• ​Age
• - As we age, the number of taste buds and their sensitivity decreases
• - impacts a person’s flavour perception because it weakens their ability to discriminate between tastes

• Memory
• - Memory of past food experiences helps create an expectation of a food’s taste. 
• - The smell, texture and appearance of food can instantly evoke memories of eating the food and the emotions we felt at the time we tasted it.

• Food-packaging
• - colour, noise, texture, weight, colour of serving utensils

• Appearance
• - brain receives visual information before taste information
• associate visual cues with tastes
• - These learned associations help create expectations about how a food should smell and taste
• - colour does not match = taste food diff
• - more intense coour = intense flavour

• Culture:
• - People from different cultures eat different foods and have different preferences for particular tastes.
• - Where families live
• - Where their ancestors came from
• - Socio-economic background 
• - The values or beliefs a society

Bottom-up processing builds knowledge in real-time as the stimuli are received, allowing each of the elements to be perceived.

Top-down processing uses prior knowledge to fit the incoming stimuli with similar previous understandings.

Visual agnosia refers to an impairment in recognizing visually presented objects. 

They can see, but cannot interpret what they see.

Damage to neural pathways that connect their brain's occiptal lobes with other sensory processing areas.

Spatial neglect: a cognitive impairment where affected people fail to pay attention to, recognise or respond to stimuli located on one side of their body or in their visual space.

Visual illusion: a consistent misinterpretation of a visual stimulus.

How it demonstrates the fallibility of visual perceptual systems

• - used to 3D world with many buildings with corners 
• - see the horizontal line with inward-point (>-<) as more distant as though it were the inside corner of a room
• - see outward-point (<->) as outer corner of building, closer
• - apparent distance hypothesis - an apparently more-distant object that has the same-sized reinal image as an apparently nearer object will be perceived as larger

Supertasters are born with more taste buds and taste receptors on their tongue than average, and so have a higher taste sensitivity

Miraculin: a type of protein extracted from the ‘miracle berry’ which alters taste perception in humans.

When consumed with something sour, turns the sour taaste into a sweet taste

Synaesthesia: refers to a group of neurological conditions where information taken in by one sense is involuntarily experienced in a way normally associated with another sense.

Random allocation - uses chance to determine how participants are assigned to groups.

e.g. the researcher may use a random number generator to place participants into groups

Within-subjects design - scores are compared within the same participants (that is, each person’s score is compared with their own score at a different time).

Benefit: individual difference between participants do not influence results as they are compared to themselves

Limitation: susceptible to the order effect as they participate in both conditions - engaging in test procedures twice.

Between-subjects design -  scores are compared between different participants.

Benefit: no order effects - only take the experiement once

Limitation: Assumes groups are similar on range of EV that may affect DV - if groups are different, creates confounding variable, affecting results.