II: Influences on Perception

Objectives:

✤ Explain how our expectations, contexts, emotions, and motivation influence our perception.

✤ List the claims of ESP, and discuss the conclusions of most research psychologists after putting these claims to the test.

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What do you see?

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a. b.

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✤ Describe what you saw. Keep in mind, that this is a police investigation and that your testimony can be used in a court of law.

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1 . P a s t e x p e r i e n c e s“ S t a r s p a n g l e d _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ”

2 . M o o d s , A t t i t u d e s , a n d V a l u e s

H a v i n g a b a d d a y a n d “ t h i n g s ” s e e m t o s n o w b a l l

3 . N e e d sI f y o u ’ r e h u n g r y , y o u t h i n k a b o u t …

4. What the group believes

W e h a v e a t e n d e n c y t o , “ g o a l o n g w i t h t h e c r o w d . ”

S E E I N G – H E A R I N G – T O U C H I N G – T A S T I N G – S M E L L I N G

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Perceptual Seta mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not the other (top-down processing)

✤ Can influence what we hear, taste, feel, and see

✤ Through experiences we form concepts, or schemas that organize and allow us to interpret unfamiliar information

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Perceptual Set

✤ Examples:

✤ Pilot: Cheer up “Gear Up”

✤ Vinegar in beer- tastes better. Until…..

✤ Stereotypes about gender. Newborn David or Diana? Without color cues blue or pink- difficult identifying gender.

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Context Effectsa stimulus may trigger radically different perceptions (in others), partly because of our differing perceptual set, but also because of the immediate context.

✤ The brain can work backward in time to allow a later stimulus to determine how we perceive an earlier one. (top-down processing)

✤ “eel is on the wagon” perceive the first word as wheel

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Emotion and Motivation

✤ Our emotional context, as well as our motivation, can create expectations and color our interpretation of events and behaviors

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ESP

The controversial claim that perception can occur apart from sensory input; includes telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition

Parapsychology

The study of paranormal phenomena, including ESP and psychokinesis

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Testable forms of ESP

Telepathy

Mind-to-mind communication

Clairvoyance

Perceiving remote events, such as a house on fire in another state

Precognition

Perceiving future events, such as a unexpected death in the next month

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Premonitions or Pretensions?

Can psychics see the future? Can psychics aid police in identifying locations of dead bodies? What about psychic predictions of the famous Nostradamus?

✤ The answers to these questions are NO! Nostradamus’ predictions are “retrofitted” to events that took place after his predictions.

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Putting ESP to Experimental Test

In an experiment with 28,000 indivduals, Wiseman attempted to prove whether or not one can psychically influence or predict a coin toss. People were able to correctly influence or predict a coin toss 49.8% of the time.

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Claims to ESP

Skeptics argue:

1. to believe in ESP you must believe the brain is capable of perceiving with out sensory input

2. researchers have been unable to replicate ESP Phenomena under controlled conditions

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