Introduction

Lecture 01
PSY 4002
Sensation and Perception
Today’s plan
• Course administration
• Why perception?
• What is perception?
– the perceptual process
– top-down vs bottom-up
– studying perception
• What to expect?
• Goals
• My research

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Course Outline
Read the following documents carefully (on Moodle)!
• Course Outline
• Supplementary Course Info
• Grading criteria

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Assessment
• Continuous assessment : 100%
– Quizzes: 50%
• three quizzes in total (see schedule Course Outline)
• 20% from the best two quizzes; 10% from the worst one
– Project: 40%
• 20% group presentation (during tutorial)
• 20% individual written report
(due on TURNITIN) at 23:59 on April 25
– Class activities: 10%
• 6 activities, 2% each; count top 5 only
(worst one to be dropped)

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 Textbooks
• Wolfe et al. (5th eds.) • Goldstein (10th eds.)

Free companion website

(of an older edition of the same book):
https://cdn.sinauer.com/wolfe4e/index.html

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Class rules
• DOs
– CC all your group members in emails about group work
– Participate (e.g., raise hands, answer questions)
– Feel free to interrupt me, e.g.,
• Ask if there’s anything unclear
• Stop me if I’m going too fast/slow
– give feedback/suggestion if you have any idea about the
course (content, topics, teaching format, etc.)
– Call me “Alan” (other names make me nervous…)
• DON’Ts
– disturb or create distractions for your classmates
(e.g., whispers, small talks, cell phones,
eat very distracting food, snore, etc.)
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“For your interest ☺”
• In the slides, information marked below this tag is for your
interest only.
• Such information is out of the scope of the Quizzes
(i.e., it will NOT show up any of the quizzes).
• However, it may be interesting and helpful for your learning,
your project, your written report, etc.

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Your favorite area(s) of psychology?

Cross-cultural
Industrial/
Organizational Developmental

Social Cognitive
Clinical

Sensation & Perception

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Sensation & Perception
• from physical stimulations to neural signals
• from neural signals to information, meaning, understanding,
awareness, …
• The distinction is not very useful nowadays…
many psychologists and researchers just refer to the whole
process as perception.

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Why perception?
Sensation & Perception: It’s deep…
• Fundamental questions in philosophy/psychology,
e.g.
– “What is reality?”
– “Is the red I see the same as the red others see?”
– “What constitutes a conscious experience of the world?”
– “Can we make a machine that can ‘perceive’?”

• Fuzzy lines
– between sensation / perception / cognition
– It’s all about “making sense of the world”

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Sensation & Perception: It’s challenging

psychology

philosophy neuroscience

Sensation
engineering & statistics
Perception
artificial
intelligence
physics
and
many
more…
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Sensation & Perception: It’s FUN!!
What do you hear?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio
-clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html

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Sensation & Perception: It’s FUN!!
• How does your brain work?

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Sensation & Perception: It’s FUN!!
• How does your brain work?

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Sensation & Perception: It’s FUN!!
• How does your brain NOT work?

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Sensation & Perception: It’s FUN!!
• How does your brain NOT work?

Which one looks different from the other two?

A B C
3rd Prize in the “Illusion of the Year Contest 2014”
Kimberley D. Orsten and James R. Pomerantz
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Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
Sensation & Perception: It’s FUN!!
• How does your brain NOT work?
• Illusions!!
– http://illusionoftheyear.com/
– http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/
• Our perception is not always
the same as the reality!!
(and it’s actually “good” for us,
for the most part…)

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Today’s plan
• Course administration
• Why perception?
• What is perception?
– the perceptual process
– top-down vs bottom-up
– studying perception
• What to expect?
• Goals
• My research

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The Perceptual Process

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 [details for your interest only]

Steps 1 & 2: Distal vs Proximal Stimulus

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 [details for your interest only]

Step 3: Receptor Processes

• Sensory receptors:
– cells specialized to respond to
environmental energy.
• Transduction:
– transformation of energy in the environment
(e.g., light energy, sound energy, pressure, etc.)
to nerve impulses.

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 [details for your interest only]

Step 3: Receptor Processes

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 [details for your interest only]

Step 4: Neural Processing

• Neural processing: changes that occur as signals are
transmitted through the maze of neurons

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 [details for your interest only]

Steps 5 – 7: Behavioral Responses

• Experience and Action:
– Electrical signals are transformed into conscious
experience.
– perceiving an object (e.g., “I see a person”)
– recognizing an object (e.g., relates the object to the
“human” category, categorizes the person is your friend,
the name is “Alan”, you had lunch with him last week)
– taking actions (e.g., move your eyes to look at the person’s
eyes, walk towards the person, say “hi”)

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 [details for your interest only]

Steps 5 – 7: Behavioral Responses

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Knowledge
• any information the perceiver brings to a situation
• Bottom-up processing
– based on incoming stimuli from the environment
– also called data-based or data-driven processing
• Top-down processing
– based on the perceiver’s existing knowledge (cognitive
factors)
– also called knowledge-based processing

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Bottom-up vs Top-down processing
• example

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Bottom-up vs Top-down processing
• example

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Bottom-up vs Top-down processing
• example

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Bottom-up vs Top-down processing
• example

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Top-down influence on perception
• more examples…

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Top-down vs Bottom-up: Illustrated

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Studying the Perceptual Process
• Observing/Manipulating perceptual processes at
different stages in the system.

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Studying the Perceptual Process
• A: stimulus-perception relationship
• B: stimulus-physiology relationship
• C: physiology-perception relationship

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What to expect in this course?
• This is one of the most “science-flavored” psychology courses
(with some physics, neuroscience, math, etc.).

• This course is challenging, but you’re going to learn

a lot of new things (knowledge, concepts, skills, perspectives)!

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Goals
• to describe basic and everyday sensory and perceptual
phenomena scientifically
• to explain sensory and perceptual phenomena in terms of
their underlying processes
• to apply knowledge in sensation and perception in other
fields of psychological studies
• to think about psychological phenomena from a perceptual
perspective

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 My work: metacognition
• How do we make judgments about our own perception?
– Metacognition:
• cognition of cognition;
perception of perception
– Confidence judgment:
• subjective judgments about
our own task performance (link to image source)
– Some relevant work:
• Global visual confidence Lee, de Gardelle, & Mamassian (2021)
• The Confidence Database Rahnev, Desender, Lee, et al. (2020)
• Cross-domain association in metacognitive efficiency
depends on first-order task types Lee, Ruby, Giles, & Lau (2018)
• Lee, Yabuki, Lee, & Or (2023)
• Arnold, Clendinen, Johnston, Lee, & Yarrow (2024)

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 My work: adaptation & learning
• How do we learn in and adapt to different sensory environments?
– Sensory adaptation and Perceptual learning:
our brain learns and adapts as we are exposed to different kinds
of sensory stimuli in the world.
• Adaptation can lead to perceptual biases.
• Learning can improve our perceptual sensitivity.
– Some relevant work:
• Parts beget parts:
Bootstrapping hierarchical object representations
through visual statistical learning Lee, Liu, & Lu (2021)
• Global-motion aftereffect does not depend on
awareness of the adapting motion direction Lee & Lu (2014)
• Lee (2018)
• Lee & Lu (2012)

You’ll see weird stuff as a consequence…

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 Motion Adaptation
→ Motion AfterEffect (MAE)
 My work: perception and human factors
• Face perception:
– Face masks are less effective than sunglasses
in masking face identity Or et al. (2023)
– Or, Goh, & Lee (2021)
– Or, Lim, Chen, & Lee (2023)

• Human factors:
– Attention capture by own name
decreases with speech compression
Li, Lee, Chiu, Loeb, & Sanderson (2024)
– Li, Moledo, Yeung, Lee, Loeb, & Sanderson (2023)
– Lau, Li, Lee, Sanderson, & Loeb (2022)

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