TEST YOURSELF 1.

1
1. What are some reasons for studying perception?
Medical applications that depend on an understanding of perception include devices to
restore perception to people who have lost vision or hearing and treatments for pain. Other
applications include robotic vehicles that can fi nd their way through unfamiliar
environments, face recognition systems that can identify people as they pass through
airport security, speech recognition systems that can understand what someone is saying,
and highway signs that are visible to drivers under a variety of conditions.
Studying perception can help you become more aware of the nature of your own perceptual
experiences. You will come away from reading this book with a heightened appreciation of
both the complexity and the beauty of the mechanisms responsible for your perceptual
experiences, and perhaps even with an enhanced awareness of the world around you.
2. Describe the process of perception as a series of seven steps, beginning with the
environmental stimulus and culminating in the behavioral responses of perceiving,
recognizing, and acting.
Step 1: Environmental stimulus.
Step 2: Light is reflected and transformed. Information about the tree (the environmental
stimulus) is carried by light, which is transformed when it is reflected from the tree, when it
travels through the atmosphere, and when it is focused by the eyes optical system. The
result is an image of the tree on the retina, which serves as a representation of the tree.
Step 3: Receptor processes. These processes include transduction (the transformation of
light energy into electrical energy) and the shaping of perception by the properties of visual
pigments in the receptors outer segments. The end result is an electrical representation of
the tree.
Step 4: Neural processing. This involves interactions between the signals traveling in
networks of neurons early in the system, in the retina; later, on the pathway to the brain;
and finally, within the brain.
Step 5: Perception. Conscious awareness of the tree
Step 6: Recognition. Placing an object in a category that gives it meaning
Step 7: Action. Involves motor activities.
The fact that perception often leads to action means that perception is a continuously
changing process. Thus, although we can describe the perceptual process as a series of
steps that begins with the environmental stimulus and ends with perception,
recognition, and action, the overall process is dynamic and continually changing.
3. What is the role of higher-level or cognitive processes in perception? Be sure you
understand the difference between bottom-up and top-down processing.

Knowledge can affect a number of the steps in the perceptual process. Knowledge that a
person brings to a situation can be information acquired years ago or, as in the following
demonstration, information just recently acquired.
An example of how knowledge acquired years ago can influence the perceptual process is
the ability to categorize objects. This is something you do every time you name an object.
Perception is determined by an interaction between bottom-up processing, which starts with
the image on the receptors, and top-down processing, which brings the observers
knowledge into play. In this example, (a) the image of the moth on the womans retina
initiates bottom-up processing; and (b) her prior knowledge of moths contributes to topdown processing.
4. What does it mean to say that perception can be studied using different approaches?
Give an example of how each approach was applied to determine each of the relationships
in Figure 1.8 for the oblique effect.
The three relationships that are usually measured to study the perceptual process are the
psychophysical relationship between stimuli and perception and the physiological
relationships between stimuli and physiology and between physiology and perception.
The three major components of the seven-step perceptual process: Stimuli (Steps 1 and 2);
Physiology (Steps 3 and 4); and Perception, which stands for the three behavioral responses
(Steps 57). The three relationships that are usually measured to study the perceptual
process are the psychophysical relationship between stimuli and perception and the
physiological relationships between stimuli and physiology and between physiology and
perception. Results for research on the oblique effect described in the text are used as an
example.

TEST YOURSELF 1.2

1. Describe the three methods for measuring the absolute threshold.
2. What is the difference threshold? What is the Weber fraction? Webers law?
6. What does it mean to say that a persons threshold may be determined by more than the
physiological workings of his or her sensory system?.

TEST YOURSELF 2.1

1. Describe the structure of the eye and how moving an object closer to the eye affects how
light reflected from the object is focused on the retina.
2. How does the eye adjust the focusing of light by accommodation? Describe the following
conditions that can cause problems in focusing: presbyopia, myopia, hyperopia. Be sure you
understand the difference between the near point and the far point and can describe the

various solutions to focusing problems, including corrective lenses and surgery.

3. Where on the retina does a researcher need to present a stimulus to test dark adaptation
of the cones? How is this related to the distribution of the rods and cones on the retina? How
can the adaptation of cones be measured without any interference from the rods? How can
adaptation of the rods be measured without any interference from the cones?

TEST YOURSELF 2.2

3. What are some of the basic properties of action potentials?
4. Describe what happens when an action potential travels along an axon. In your
description, indicate how the charge inside the f i ber changes, and how that is related to
the fl ow of chemicals across the cell membrane.

TEST YOURSELF 3.1

1. Describe the experiment that demonstrated the effect of lateral inhibition in the Limulus.
2. How can lateral inhibition explain the spots that are perceived at the intersections of
the Hermann grid?
3. What are Mach bands, and how can lateral inhibition explain our perception of them? Be
sure to understand the calculations used in conjunction with the circuit in Figure 3.11. 4.
What is simultaneous contrast? How has it been explained by lateral inhibition? What are
some problems with this explanation?
5. How does Whites illusion demonstrate that there are some perceptual lightness effects
that lateral inhibition cannot explain? What principle has been used to explain Whites
illusion? What does this mean about the location of the mechanism that determines
lightness perception?

TEST YOURSELF 3.2 Experience Susans face red

1. What is a receptive field? What did Hartlines research indicate about receptive fields?
2. What are the characteristics of the receptive fields of a cats optic nerve and LGN
neurons? What new properties were associated with the discovery of these receptive fields?
How did these properties require that the definition of receptive field be changed? 3. What
function has been suggested for the LGN?
4. Describe the characteristics of simple, complex, and endstopped cells in the cortex. Why
have these cells been called feature detectors?

5. How has the psychophysical procedure of selective adaptation been used to demonstrate
a link between feature detectors and the perception of orientation? Be sure you understand
the rationale behind a selective adaptation experiment and also how we can draw
conclusions about physiology from the results of this psychophysical procedure.
6. How has the procedure of selective rearing been used to demonstrate a link between
feature detectors and perception? Be sure you understand the concept of neural plasticity.
7. Describe Grosss experiments on neurons in the inferotemporal cortex of the monkey.
Why do you think his results were initially ignored?
8. What is the sensory code? Describe specificity, distributed, and sparse coding. Which type
of coding is most likely to operate in sensory systems?
9. What is the mindbody problem? What is the difference between the easy problem of
consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness?

THINK ABOUT IT
1. Ralph, who is skeptical about the function of lateral inhibition, says, OK, so lateral
inhibition causes us to see Mach bands and the spots at the intersections of the Hermann
grid. Even though these perceptual effects are interesting, they dont seem very important
to me. If they didnt exist, we would see the world in just about the same way as we do with
them. (a) How would you respond to Ralph if you wanted to make an argument for the
importance of lateral inhibition? (b) What is the possibility that Ralph could be right? (p. 56)
2. Look for shadows, both inside and outside, and see if you can see Mach bands at the
borders of the shadows.
Remember that Mach bands are easier to see when the border of a shadow is slightly fuzzy.
Mach bands are not actually present in the pattern of light and dark, so you need to be sure
that the bands are not really in the light but are created by your nervous system. How can
you accomplish this? (p. 57)
3. Cell A responds best to vertical lines moving to the right. Cell B responds best to 45degree lines moving to the right. Both of these cells have an excitatory synapse with cell C.
How will cell C fi re to vertical lines? To 45-degree lines? What if the synapse between B and
C is inhibitory? (p. 65)

TEST YOURSELF 4.2

1. How has ablation been used to demonstrate the existence of the ventral and dorsal
processing streams? What is the function of these streams?

2. How has neuropsychology been used to show that one of the functions of the dorsal
stream is to process information about coordinating vision and action? How do the results of
a behavioral experiment support the idea of two primary streams in people without brain
damage?
3. What is the evidence that there are modules for faces, places, and bodies? What is the
evidence that stimuli like faces and places also activate a wide area of the cortex?
4. Describe the connection between vision and memory, as illustrated by experiments that
recorded from neurons in the MTL and hippocampus. Describe both the experiments using
still pictures and those using fi lm clips.
5. Describe the possible role of experience-dependent plasticity in determining how neurons
and brain areas respond to (a) horizontal, vertical, and slanted lines; and (b) Greebles.

THINK ABOUT IT
1. Ralph is hiking along a trail in the woods. The trail is bumpy in places, and Ralph has to
avoid tripping on occasional rocks, tree roots, or ruts in the trail. Nonetheless, he is able to
walk along the trail without constantly looking down to see exactly where he is placing his
feet. Thats a good thing because Ralph enjoys looking out at the woods to see whether he
can spot interesting birds or animals. How can you relate this description of Ralphs behavior
to the operation of the dorsal and ventral streams in the visual system? (p. 83)
2. Although most neurons in the striate cortex respond to stimulation of small areas of the
retina, many neurons in the temporal lobe respond to areas that represent as much as half
of the visual field. What do you think the function of such neurons is?
3. We have seen that the neural fi ring associated with an object in the environment does
not necessarily look like, or resemble, the object. Can you think of situations that you
encounter in everyday life in which objects or ideas 92 CHAPTER 4 Cortical Organization are
represented by things that do not exactly resemble those objects or ideas?
4. We have seen that there are neurons that respond to complex shapes and also to
environmental stimuli such as faces, bodies, and places. Which types of neurons do you
think would fi re to the stimulus in Figure 4.26? How would your answer to this question be
affected if this stimulus were interpreted as a human figure? (Howdy, pardner!) What role
would top-down processing play in determining the response to a cactus-asperson stimulus?
(p. 88)