Understand Psychology

by Nicky Hayes

PERCEPTUAL SET

expectation or mood, or other social influences, can give us perceptual sets, which influence what we perceive.

Bruner and Minturn

showed people sets of letters...

Each time they saw a letter or a number, they were asked to say what it was out loud. Then they were shown an ambiguous figure, which could be seen as either the figure 13 or the letter B. People who had previously been looking at letters said that it was a ‘B’, while people who had previously seen numbers said that it was a 13. Thei...

First impr...

Motivation and perception

1950s, Gilchrist and Nesburg asked people to look at pictures and

THE PERCEPTUAL CYCLE

We can also be surprised by what we see, so it’s obvious that our expectations don’t entirely determine our perception.

begin with schemas that we use to make sense of the world.

schemas help us to anticipate what we are likely to encounter, so Neisser referred to the...

schemas direct what sorts of things we notice as we explore the perceptual world.

We sample the perceptual world through our perceptual exploration and that in turn has been shaped by our anticipatory schemas (Figure 7.3

You may have been about to step into the road because your anticipatory schema has to do with being on the other side, but your perceptual exploration led you to focus on approaching cars, and the information available told you that there was one coming up fast. So you modify your anticipatory schema, waiting until the car has gone

past.

In Neisser’s model, then, perception is a continuous, active cycle,

Memory, too, is an active mental process rather than a simple tape-recording of what has happened.

we don’t often have a separate, objective record of what actually did happen, so we can’t compare our memories with the real thing.

ACTIVE REMEMBERING

a few occasions when we do have some objective evidence to compare it with,

Have you ever been to see a film twice, with a gap of several years in between? If you have, you will often find that some of your favourite scenes in the film don’t happen exactly the way that you remember them.

Ulrich Neisser showed how this can happen in an analysis of some of the evidence given during the Watergate trials in America, which eventually resulted in the impeachment of President Nixon.

John Deane’s memory One of the important witnesses in these trials was

Different words were used, topics were mentioned in a different order, and sometimes particularly memorable phrases hadn’t actually been said at all. And yet, even though the details were all wrong, the actual meaning of what had gone on was perfectly correct.

Bartlett identified seven types of changes, which are listed in Table 7.1

They were then asked questions about it. Among the questions there was one about the speed of the cars, and this was phrased very carefully. Half of the people were asked ‘How fast were the cars going when they hit one another?’ while the other half were asked ‘How fast were the cars going when they smashed into one another?’ All the other questions were the same.

A week later, the same people were asked to remember the film they had seen. Among other things, they were asked whether there had been any broken glass in the film. There hadn’t been any, and those who had been asked about the cars hitting one another remembered that. But those who had been asked about the cars smashing into one another distinctly remembered broken glass strewn around the road, and were surprised to find that it wasn’t there when they saw the film again.

people who have to ask questions to witnesses for court. People can pick up subtle hints and suggestions from the words that are used, and are often entirely unaware that they are doing it.

Gibson (1982) argued that the use of hypnotism on witnesses in police investigations should be regarded as being equivalent to tampering with evidence. Memory doesn’t work like a tape-recording. It can be changed and adjusted even some time after the event, without the person even knowing. And once that has happened, there is no way at all of telling the difference between a constructed memory and a ‘real’ one.

CODING MEMORIES

Modes of representation

kinds of memories that we are most aware of using in everyday life generally involve one of four different modes of representation.

One of these is when information is stored in complete meaningful units, such as concepts and schemas,

When an infant is first born it has a lot to learn, and a great deal of that learning is to do with the body.

Since actions and feelings are the central part of the child’s interaction with its world,

its memories tend to be stored as impressions of actions – as ‘muscle memories’. This is known as enactive representation.

they repeat actions that have produced an effect – such as moving a hand as if they were hitting a rattle, even though the rattle isn’t there.

You, too, are likely to have some memories stored using enactive representation. Imagine the feel of a wonder waltzer, or a rollercoaster, and the chances are you will get an impression of how it felt on the muscles of your body. That’s enactive representation.

other ways

iconic representation. This involves storing information as images, like pictures, or images of sounds.

Iconic representation first develops as the young child’s world begins to expand, and they encounter some kinds of information which can’t ...

reading a book, for instance, or watching TV, the muscle actions which you...

Children tend to use iconic imagery a great deal.

About one in ten children have eidetic imagery

usually disappears with puberty, and the number of adults with eidetic memory is estimated to...

One of the reasons why it seems to disappear is because iconic memory is much less flexible and adaptable than other ways of remembering.

Bruner and Kenney (1966) showed that children who used iconic imagery could remember a particular pattern of glasses, arranged on a grid in ascending size and order (Figure 7.4) quite accurately. But if they were asked to describe what the grid would look like if the order was reversed, they couldn’t do it.

Children who used symbolic representation, though, could do it easily.

involves remembering things by using symbols to represent the information in the mind.