Sensation and Perception

Everything that organisms know about the world is first encountered when stimuli in the environment
activate sensory organs, initiating awareness of the external world. Perception involves the interpretation of
the sensory inputs as a cognitive process.

● Sensation: the detection of external stimuli via the five senses, and the transmission of this information
to the brain.
o Bottom-up processing: sensory receptors register information about the external
environment and send it up to the brain for interpretation.

● Perception is the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information so that it makes sense.
o Top-down processing: information processing guided by higher-level mental processes;
constructs perceptions based on experience and expectations.

● Transduction: conversion of one form of energy into another that the brain can use.
o Sensory receptors in the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin detect sensory information.
o That sensory information is transformed into neural impulses.
o The neural impulses are sent to the brain for processing.

● Absolute Threshold: the minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50 percent of
the time.
o Example: to test your absolute threshold for sound, a hearing specialist would expose each of
your ears to varying sound levels. For each tone, the test would define where half the time you
could detect the sound and half the time you could not. That 50-50 point would define your
absolute threshold.

● Signal detection theory: a theory predicting how and when we detect the presence of a faint stimulus
(signal) amid background distractions. Assumes there is no single absolute threshold and that detection
depends partly on a person’s experience, expectations, motivation, and alertness.
o Signal detection theorists seek to understand why people respond differently to the same
stimuli, and why the same person’s reactions vary as circumstances change.
▪ Exhausted parents will notice the faintest whimper from a newborn’s cradle while failing
to notice louder, unimportant sounds.

● Subliminal: below one’s absolute threshold for conscious awareness.

o Under certain conditions you can be affected by stimuli so weak that you don’t consciously
notice them.
▪ Priming: when the exposure to one stimulus influences the response to another
stimulus.
● Priming thirsty people with the subliminal word “thirst” can, for a moment,
make a thirst-quenching beverage ad more persuasive, but “subliminal
messaging” does not have a powerful, enduring effect on behavior.

● Difference threshold (just noticeable difference): the minimum difference a person can detect
between any two stimuli 50 percent of the time.
o The difference threshold increases with the size of the stimulus.
 o Weber’s law: states that for an average person to perceive a difference, two stimuli must differ
by a constant proportion, not a constant amount.
▪ If you had 1 ounce to a 10-ounce weight, you will detect the difference; add 1 ounce to
a 100-ounce weight and you probably will not.

● Sensory adaptation: diminished sensitivity as a consequence of constant stimulation.

o When we are constantly exposed to a stimulus that does not change, we become less aware of it
because our nerve cells fire less frequently.
▪ The only exception is with vision because, unnoticed by us, our eyes are constantly
moving. This continual flitting from one spot to another ensures that stimulation on the
eyes’ receptors continually changes.
o Gives us freedom to focus on informative changes in our environment without being distracted
by background noise.
o Helps explain television’s attention-grabbing power. Cuts, edits, zooms, pans, sudden
noises—all demand attention and keep viewers engaged.

VISION: our eyes receive light energy and transduce (transform) it into neural messages that our brain then
processes into what we consciously see.
● When you look at a bright red tulip, what strikes your eyes is not particles of the color red but pulses of
electromagnetic energy that your visual system perceives as red.
o Wavelength: the distance from one wave peak to the next.
▪ Determines hue (color).

o Amplitude: the wave’s height.

▪ Determines brightness/intensity.

VISION PROCESS

1. Light enters the eye through the cornea, which protects the eye and bends light to provide focus.
2. The light then passes through the pupil, a small adjustable opening.
3. Surrounding the pupil and controlling its size is the iris, a colored muscle that dilates or constricts in
response to light intensity and even to inner emotions.
o Each iris is so distinctive that an iris-scanning machine can confirm your identity.
4. The lens, behind the pupil, focuses incoming light rays and projects them onto the retina, the thin
inner surface of the back of the eyeball.
o Accommodation: the process by which the eye’s lens changes shape to focus near or far
objects on the retina.
5. Receptor cells gather sensory information from the light and activate neighboring cells in the optic
nerve which then sends the information to the brain for processing.
RETINAL ANATOMY

● Bipolar cells: specialized cells that connect and transmit information from the eye’s receptor cells
(rods and cones) to the ganglion cells that make up the optic nerve.

● Ganglion cells: receives information from bipolar cells and transmits it to the brain for processing.

● Cones: receptors in the retina that detect fine detail and color.
o Clustered in the fovea, a small depression in the center of the retina where visual acuity is
highest.
o Each cone transmits information to a single bipolar cell that helps relay the cone’s individual
message to the visual cortex, which devotes a large area to input from the fovea.
▪ These direct connections preserve the cones’ precise information, making them better
able to detect fine detail.
o Approximately 6 million per retina

● Rods: receptors in the retina that enable black and white vision; they detect black, white, and gray.
o Located predominantly in the outer regions of the retina.
o Necessary for peripheral and twilight vision.
o They remain sensitive in dim light.
o Unlike cones, rods share bipolar cells with other rods, sending combined messages to the
cortex.
▪ This results in less sensitivity to detail.
o Approximately 120 million per retina

● Optic nerve: the nerve that carries neural impulses from the eye to the brain.
o Made up of the axons of ganglion cells.
o Blind spot: the point at which the optic nerve leaves the eye, creating a “blind” spot because
no receptor cells are located there.
▪ The brain normally fills in this gap automatically, so you assume the world continues
and are not aware that a blind spot exists in the middle of your field of vision.
VISUAL INFORMATION PROCESSING

● Optic chiasm: the point in the brain where the optic nerve fibers from each eye cross over each other.
o The visual information originating in the right halves of the two retinas is transmitted to the left
side of the occipital lobe for processing.
o The visual information in the left halves of the two retinas is transmitted to the right side of the
occipital lobe for processing.

● Thalamus: most sensory information first goes to the thalamus where it is then routed to the
appropriate area of the cortex for processing.
o Smell is the exception.

● Visual cortex: located in the occipital lobe, it is the part of the cerebral cortex involved in vision.
o Most information travels to the primary visual cortex where it is processed before moving to
other visual areas for further analysis.

● Feature detectors: neurons in the brain that respond to specific features of the stimulus, such as
shape, angle, or movement.
o Example: the brain’s face-perception occurs separately from its object-perception.
o Brain activity is so specific that, with the help of brain scans, “we can tell if a person is looking
at a shoe, a chair, or a face, based on the pattern of their brain activity.”

● Parallel processing: the processing of many aspects of a stimulus simultaneously.

o To analyze a visual scene, the brain divides it into subdimensions—color, motion, form,
depth—and works on each aspect simultaneously.
o We then construct our perceptions by integrating the separate but parallel work of these
different visual teams.

● Facial perception: the brain has specific cortical areas and even neurons that specialize in perceiving
faces.
o The fusiform gyrus in the right temporal lobe specializes in perceiving faces and responds
most strongly to upright faces.
▪ People have a surprisingly hard time recognizing faces, especially unknown faces, that
are upside down.
o To recognize a face, the brain integrates information projected by the retinas to several visual
cortex areas, compares it to stored information, and enables you to recognize the face.
● The whole facial recognition process requires tremendous brain power—30
percent of the cortex (10 times the brain area devoted to hearing).
● Prosopagnosia: the inability to recognize faces, but not objects.

COLOR VISION

Our difference threshold for colors is so low that we can discriminate more than 1 million different color
variations. At least, most of us can. For about 1 persons in 50, vision is color deficient—and that person is
usually male, because the defect is genetically sex linked.

● Trichromatic theory: the theory that the retina contains three different color receptors—one most
sensitive to red, one to green, and one to blue—which, when stimulated in combination, can produce
the perception of any color.
o Example: there are no receptors especially sensitive to yellow. We see yellow when mixing red
and green light, which stimulates both red-sensitive and green-sensitive cones.
 o Most people with color-deficient vision are not actually “colorblind.” They simply lack
functioning red or green sensitive cones, or sometimes both.

● Opponent-process theory: the theory that opposing retinal processes (red-green, yellow-blue,
white-black) enable color vision.
o In the retina and in the thalamus (where impulses from the retina are relayed en route to the
visual cortex), some neurons are turned “on” by red but turned “off ” by green. Others are
turned on by green but off by red.
▪ Like red and green marbles sent down a narrow tube, “red” and “green” messages
cannot both travel at once. Thus, we do not experience reddish green because red and
green are opponents.
▪ Red and blue travel in separate channels, so we can see a reddish-blue magenta.
o Afterimages: stare at a green square for a while and then look at a white sheet of paper, and
you will see red, green’s opponent color.
▪ By staring at green, we tire our green response. When we then stare at white, only the
red part of the green-red pairing will fire normally.

Color processing occurs in two stages. The retina’s red, green, and blue cones respond in varying degrees to
different color stimuli, as the trichromatic theory suggested. Their signals are then processed by the nervous
system’s opponent-process cells.

AUDITION (HEARING): hearing is highly adaptive. We hear a wide range of sounds, but the ones
we hear best are those sounds with frequencies in a range corresponding to that of the human voice.

● Amplitude (height) of sound waves determines their loudness.

● Frequency: the number of complete wavelengths that pass a point in a given time (for example, per
second).
o Frequency determines a tone’s pitch, the experienced highness or lowness.

HEARING PROCESS: the intricate process that transforms vibrating air into nerve impulses, which our
brain decodes as sounds, begins when sound waves enter the outer ear.

1. An intricate mechanical chain reaction begins as the visible outer ear channels the waves through the
auditory canal to the eardrum, a tight membrane, causing it to vibrate.

2. In the middle ear, the chamber between the eardrum and the cochlea, a piston made of three tiny
bones, the hammer, anvil, and stirrup, picks up the vibrations and transmits them to the cochlea, a
snail-shaped tube in the inner ear.

3. The incoming vibrations cause the cochlea’s membrane to vibrate, jostling the fluid that fills the tube.
This motion causes ripples in the cochlea’s basilar membrane, bending the hair cells lining its surface,
not unlike the wind bending a wheat field.

4. Hair cell movement triggers impulses in the adjacent nerve cells. Axons of those cells converge to form
the auditory nerve which sends neural messages (via the thalamus) to the auditory cortex in the
brain’s temporal lobe.
PERCEIVING LOUDNESS: we do not detect loudness from the intensity of a hair cell’s response. Rather, a
soft, pure tone activates only the few hair cells attuned to its frequency. Given louder sounds, neighboring hair
cells also respond. Thus, the brain can interpret loudness from the number of activated hair cells.
● If a hair loses sensitivity to soft sounds, it may still respond to loud sounds.

PERCEIVING PITCH

● Place theory: presumes that we hear different pitches because different sound waves trigger activity at
different places along the cochlea’s basilar membrane.
o The brain determines a sound’s pitch be recognizing the specific place on the membrane that is
generating the neural signal.
o A problem remains: place theory can explain how we hear high-pitched sounds, but not
low-pitched sounds.
▪ The neural signals generated by low-pitched sounds are not so neatly localized on the
basilar membrane.

● Frequency theory: suggests that the brain reads pitch by monitoring the frequency of neural impulses
traveling up the auditory nerve.
 o The whole basilar membrane vibrates with the incoming sound wave, triggering neural impulses
to the brain at the same rate as the sound wave.
▪ If the sound wave has a frequency of 100 waves per second, then 100 pulses per second
travel up the auditory nerve.
o A problem remains: an individual neuron cannot fire faster than 1000 times per second. How,
then, can we sense sounds with frequencies above 1000 waves per second?

● Volley principle: like soldiers who alternate firing so that some can shoot while others reload, neural
cells can alternate firing. By firing in rapid succession, they can achieve a combined frequency above
1000 waves per second.

● Place theory best explains how we sense high pitches, frequency theory best explains how we
sense low pitches, and some combination of the two seems to handle the pitches in the
intermediate range.

LOCATING SOUNDS: as the placement of our eyes allows us to sense visual depth, so the placement of our
two ears allows us to enjoy stereophonic (multidirectional) hearing.
● Two ears are better than one for at least two reasons.
o If a car to the right honks, your right ear receives a more intense sound, and it receives sound
slightly sooner than your left ear.
▪ Our super sensitive auditory system can detect such minute differences.

TOUCH: our sense of touch is actually a mix of distinct skin sense for pressure, warmth, cold, and pain.
Touching various spots on the skin with a soft hair, a warm or cool wire, and the point of a pin reveals that
some spots are especially sensitive to pressure, others to warmth, others to cold, and still others to pain. Other
skin sensations are variations of the basic four.

● Stroking adjacent pressure spots creates a tickle.

● Repeated gentle stroking of a pain spot creates an itching sensation.

● Touching adjacent cold and pressure spots triggers a sense of wetness, which you can experience by
touching dry, cold metal.

● Stimulating nearby cold and warm spots produces the sensation of hot.

PAIN: your body’s way of telling you something has gone wrong. Pain orders you to change your behavior.
Without the discomfort that makes us occasionally shift position, joints fail from excess strain, and without the
warnings of pain, the effects of unchecked infections and injuries accumulate.

● Individual pain sensitivity varies depending on genes, physiology, experience, attention, and
surrounding culture.
o Feeling pain reflects both bottom-up sensations and top-down processes.

● Nociceptors: sensory receptors than detect hurtful temperatures, pressure, or chemicals.

o They send an impulse to the spinal cord, which passes the message to the brain, which
interprets the signal as pain.
 ● Gate-control theory: the theory that the spinal cord contains a neurological “gate” that blocks pain
signals or allows them to pass on to the brain.
o The “gate” is opened by the activity of pain signals traveling up small nerve fibers and is closed
by activity in larger fibers or by information coming from the brain.
▪ When tissue is injured, the small fibers activate and open the gate, and you feel pain.
▪ Large-fiber activity closes the gate, blocking pain signals and preventing them from
reaching the brain.
● One way to treat chronic pain is to stimulate (by massage, electrical stimulation,
or acupuncture) “gate-closing” activity in the large neural fibers.
o Brain to spinal cord messages can also close the gate.
▪ When we are distracted from pain and soothed by the release of our natural painkilling
endorphins, our experience of pain diminishes.

TASTE:
● Like our sense of touch, taste involves several basic sensations.
o Sweet
o Salty
o Sour
o Bitter
o Umami
o Oleogustus

● Taste exists for more than our pleasure.

o Appealing tastes attracted our ancestors to energy or protein rich foods that enabled their
survival.
o Aversive tastes deterred them from new foods that might be toxic.

● Taste is a chemical sense. Inside each little bump on the top and sides of your tongue are 200 or more
taste buds, each containing a pore that catches food chemicals.
o Into each taste bud pore, 50 to 100 taste receptor cells project antennalike hairs that sense food
molecules.
▪ Some receptors respond mostly to sweet-tasting molecules, other to salty, sour, umami,
or bitter tasting ones.
▪ Taste receptors reproduce themselves every week or two, so if you burn your tongue
with hot food it hardly matters.
▪ As you grow older, the number of taste buds decreases, as does taste sensitivity.
● Smoking and alcohol use accelerate these declines.
o Neural impulses are sent to the temporal lobe for processing.

● Expectations can influence taste.

OLFACTION (SMELL): you inhale something of whatever it is you smell.

● We smell something when molecules of a substance carried in the air reach a tiny cluster of 5 million or
more receptor cells at the top of each nasal cavity.
 o These olfactory receptor cells, waving like sea anemones on a reef, respond selectively to
different smells as they instantly alert the brain through their axon fibers.
o Odor molecules come in many shapes and sizes—so many, in fact, that it takes many different
receptors to detect them.
▪ There are 350 or so receptor proteins that recognize particular odor molecules.
● As a key slips into a lock, so odor molecules slip into these receptors.
● We don’t seem to have a distinct receptor for each detectable odor.
o Some odors trigger a combination of receptors, in patterns that are
interpreted by the olfactory cortex.
▪ This produces the 10,000 odors we can detect.

● Though it’s difficult to recall odors by name, we have a remarkable capacity to recognize long-forgotten
odors and their associated memories.
o A hotline runs between the brain area receiving information from the nose and the brain’s
ancient limbic centers associated with memory and emotion.

BODY POSITION AND MOVEMENT:

● Kinesthesis: the system for sensing the position and movement of individual body parts.
o Enabled by important sensors in the joints, tendons, bones, ears, and skin.

● Vestibular sense: monitors the head’s (and thus the body’s) position and movement.
o The biological gyroscopes for this sense of equilibrium are in the inner ear.
▪ The semicircular canals, which look like a three-dimensional pretzel, and vestibular
sacs, which connect the canals with the cochlea, contain fluid that moves when your
head rotates or tilts.
● This movement stimulates hair-like receptors, which send messages to the
cerebellum at the back of the brain, thus enabling you to sense your body
position and to maintain your balance.
● If you twirl around and then come to an abrupt halt, neither the fluid in your
semicircular canals nor your kinesthetic receptors will immediately return to
their neutral state. The dizzy aftereffect fools your brain with the sensation that
you’re still spinning.

SENSORY INTERACTION
● Sensory interaction: the principle that one sense may influence another, as when the smell of food
influences its taste.
o To savor a taste, we normally breathe the aroma through our nose.
o Smell plus texture plus taste equals flavor.
o Our senses—tasting, smelling, hearing, seeing, touching—are not totally separate information
channels. In interpreting the world, our brain blends their inputs.

● McGurk effect: a perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and
vision in speech perception. The illusion occurs when the auditory component of one sound is paired
with the visual component of another sound, leading to the perception of a third sound.
o Seeing the mouth movements for ga while hearing ba, we may perceive da.
● Embodied cognition: the influence of bodily sensations, gestures, and other states on cognitive
preferences and judgments.
o After holding a warm drink rather than a cold one, people are more likely to rate someone more
warmly, feel closer to them, and behave more generously.

● Phantom limb sensations: the experience of sensation or pain in nonexistent limbs (most commonly
as a result of amputation).
o Occurs when the brain misinterprets the spontaneous central nervous system activity that
occurs in the absence of normal sensory input.

● Tinnitus: a chronic ringing in the ears.

o The most common cause of tinnitus is damage to and loss of the tiny sensory hair cells in the
cochlea of the inner ear.
o This tends to happen as people age, and it can also result from prolonged exposure to
excessively loud noise.

● Sensorineural hearing loss (nerve deafness): hearing loss caused by damage to the cochlea’s receptor
cells or to the auditory nerves.
o Cochlear implant: a device for converting sounds into electrical signals and stimulating the
auditory nerve through electrodes threated into the cochlea.
▪ Can help restore hearing for people with sensorineural hearing loss.

● Conduction hearing loss: caused by damage to the mechanical system that conducts sound waves
through the outer and middle ear to the cochlea.

● Synesthesia: where one sort of sensation (such as hearing sound) produces another (such as seeing
color).
o Hearing music or seeing a specific number may activate color-sensitive cortex regions and
trigger a sensation of color.
o Seeing the number 3 may evoke a taste sensation.
o An odor can evoke a sensation of taste.

● Gestalt: an organized whole. Gestalt psychologists emphasized our tendency to integrate pieces of
information into meaningful wholes.
o The individual elements of the Necker cube in the image below are really nothing but eight
circles, each containing three converging white lines. When we view these elements all together,
however, we see a cube that sometimes reverses direction.
FORM PERCEPTION

● Figure-ground: the organization of the visual field into objects (the figures) that stand out from their
surroundings (the ground).
o Our first task is to perceive any object as distinct from its surroundings.
▪ Among the voices you hear at a party, the one you attend to becomes the figure; all
others are part of the ground.

● Grouping: the perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into coherent groups.

o Having discriminated figure from ground, we must also organize the figure into a meaningful
form.
o Our minds bring order and form to stimuli by following certain rules for grouping.
▪ Proximity: we group nearby figures together. In the example below, we see not six
separate lines, but three sets of two lines.
▪ Continuity: we perceive smooth, continuous patterns rather than discontinuous ones.
In the example below, the pattern could be a series of alternating semicircles, but we
perceive it as two continuous lines—one wavy, one straight.
▪ Closure: we fill in gaps to create a complete, whole object.
DEPTH PERCEPTION: enables us to estimate an object’s distance from us. At a glance, we can estimate
the distance of an oncoming car or the height of a house.

● Visual cliff: a laboratory device for testing depth perception in infants and young animals.
o Helped researchers discover that depth perception is partly innate (inborn).
o When researcher placed 6-14 month old infants on the edge of a safe canyon and had the
infants’ mothers coax them to crawl out onto the glass, most infants refused to do so, indicating
that they could perceive depth.

● Binocular cues: depth cues that depend on the use of both eyes.
o Because your eyes are about 2½ inches apart, your retinas receive slightly different images of
the world. By comparing these two images, your brain can judge how close an object is to you.
▪ Retinal disparity: a binocular cue for perceiving depth: by comparing images from the
retinas in the two eyes, the brain computes distance—the greater the disparity
(difference) between the two images, the closer the object.

● Monocular cues: depth cues available to either eye alone.

o Relative height: we perceive objects higher in our field of vision as further away.
o Relative motion: as we move, objects that are actually stable may appear to move (like when
driving).
o Relative size: if we assume two objects are similar in size, most people perceive the one that
casts the smaller retinal image as further away.
o Linear perspective: parallel lines appear to meet in the distance. The sharper the angle of
convergence, the greater the perceived distance.
o Interposition: if one object partially blocks our view of another, we perceive it as closer.
o Texture gradient: as a uniformly textured surface recedes, its texture continuously becomes less
sharp.

MOTION PERCEPTION: normally your brain computes motion based partly on its assumption that
shrinking objects are retreating (not getting smaller) and enlarging objects are approaching (not getting bigger).
● Large objects, such as trains, appear to move more slowly than smaller objects, such as cars moving at
the same speed.
PERCEPTUAL CONSTANCY: the ability to recognize objects without being deceived by changes in their
color, brightness, shape, or size.

● Color constancy: perceiving familiar objects as having consistent color, even if changing illumination
alters the wavelengths reflected by the object.
o We see color thanks to our brain’s computations of the light reflected by an object relative to the
objects surrounding it.
▪ If you viewed an isolated tomato through a paper tube, its color would seem to change
as the light—and thus the wavelengths reflected from its surface—changed. But if you
viewed that tomato as one item in a bowl of fresh vegetables, its color would remain
roughly constant as the lighting shifts.

● Shape constancy: we perceive the form of familiar objects as constant even while our retinas receive
changing images of them.
o In the image below, the door casts an increasingly trapezoidal image on our retinas as it opens,
yet we still perceive it as rectangular.

● Size constancy: we perceive objects as having a constant size, even while our distance from them
varies.
o We assume a car is large enough to carry people, even when we see its tiny image from two
blocks away.
o Perceiving an object’s distance gives us cues to its size. Likewise, knowing its general size—that
the object is a car—provides us with cues to its distance.

● Perceptual set: a mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another.
o Through experience, we come to expect certain results. Those expectations may give us a “set”
of mental tendencies and assumptions that greatly affects (top-down) what we perceive.
o Example: Consider the kindly airline pilot who, on a takeoff run, looked over at his depressed
co-pilot and said, “Cheer up.” Expecting to hear the usual “Gear up,” the co-pilot promptly
raised the wheels—before they left the ground.
o Consider the image below: Show a friend either the left or right image. Then show the center
image and ask, “What do you see?” Whether your friend reports seeing a saxophonist or a
woman’s face may depend on which of the other two drawings was viewed first. In each of
those images, the meaning is clear, and it will establish perceptual expectations.
● Context effects: a given stimulus may trigger radically different perceptions, partly because of our
differing set, but also because of the immediate context.
o Imagine hearing a noise interrupted by the words “eel is on the wagon.” Likely, you would
actually perceive the first word as wheel. Given “eel is on the orange,” you would likely hear peel.
o This phenomenon suggests that the brain can work backward in time to allow a later stimulus
to determine how we perceive an earlier one.

● Selective attention: the focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus.

o By one estimate, your five senses take in 11,000,000 bits of information per second, of which
you consciously process about 40.
o Cocktail party effect: your ability to attend to only one voice among many. Let another voice
speak your name and your cognitive radar will instantly bring that voice into consciousness.
▪ In 2009, two Northwest Airlines pilots, engrossed in conversation, ignored alarmed air
traffic controllers’ attempts to reach them as they overflew their Minneapolis destination
by 150 miles. If only the controllers had known and spoken the pilots’ names.
o Talk on the phone or text while driving and your selective attention will shift back and forth
between the road and its electronic competition.
▪ Multitasking comes at a cost—about 28% of traffic accidents occur when people are
texting and driving.

● Inattentional blindness: failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere.
o At the level of conscious awareness, we are “blind” to all but a tiny sliver of visual stimuli.
▪ People watching a video in which they are asked to count the number of times a
basketball is tossed back and forth are likely to miss the image of a man in a gorilla suit
walking across the screen.

● Change blindness: failing to notice changes in the environment.

o Magicians exploit this by distracting the audience. By selectively riveting our attention on their
left hand’s dramatic act, we fail to notice changes made with their other hand.