Psychology 10:  Introduction to Psychology

 

S/R Paper for February 5, 2009:  Sensation & Perception

By

Halford H. Fairchild, Ph.D.

 

Constance Rice:  Sojourner Truth Lecturer (February 3, 2009)

 

Stimulus:  Attorney Rice gave a scintillating talk on her career in civil rights law.  She provided insights into Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and used his idea that “we are trying to integrate into a burning house,” as a metaphor for the situation facing Blacks in America.  This idea was then used to prescribe necessary changes that must be engineered throughout society.  Notable ideas:

 

·        Power concedes nothing without a demand.

·        The Obama election is “transformative.

·        MLK suggested to Harry Belafonte that “we must become firemen.”

·        The problem of the civil rights movement, and the “affirmative action,” is that it leaves untouched the “permanent underclass.”

·        Of 17 individuals (gang members) that Rice worked with years ago, 11 are dead, and 6 are serving life sentences.

·        We forecast needed prison beds by 3rd grade reading levels.  

·        Need for an epidemiological model – you don’t cure malaria with a fly swatter, you drain the swamps and change behaviors and improve sanitation and health care, etc.

·        Schools as sites for engineering a “social recovery system.”  They ought to stay open until 11:00 pm

·        She advocates an eco-systems strategy.

 

Responses:  A perfect example of “getting your money’s worth” for a Claremont education.  The systemic approach is what is needed.  Affirmative action is a joke as far as the permanent underclass is concerned.

 

 

Film:  Vision

 

Stimulus:  The eyes as “windows to the soul.”  The film dealt a lot with the morphology of the eye, and its biological engineering.  Interesting points included:

 

·        Tears and the river that flows to the nose

·        The oil sheen on the water substance (with bactericide)

·        Blink rate slows with concentration

·        Structure of the cornea

·        Iris – named after the goddess of the rainbow

·        The visual image on the retina is upside down

·        What we see is reflected light

·        Rods and cones are dendritic terminals, an extension of the brain

·        Much can be learned from optical illusions.

·        How the brain compensates for the blind spot – how to spot the blind spot

 

Responses:  Eye contact is important.  Eyes as signals to our emotions.

·        Inverted lens experiment

·        Fuzzy retinal images – how acuity is regained.

·        What color is a lemon?

·        Each day of Intro Psych is a course – or a lifetime of research

 

Film:  Audition (Now Hear This)

 

Stimulus:  Some amazing facts

·        Earlobes condition the sound (do we are hear the same thing?)  phenomenology (& Wundt’s lab on the structures of consciousness)

·        Ear bones magnify sounds more the 20 x

·        Ear bones don’t grow

·        Higher frequencies lost with aging

·        Girls speak earlier than boys (“no one knows why”   Pssst!)

·        Sense of balance as crucial for survival

·        Semicircular canals and how they work

·        Echolocation by having ears on both sides of the head (what happens when someone is deaf in one ear?)

·        Voice recognition

 

Responses:  The brain is a “miraculous” information processing system

·        Be cautious of physiological reductionism – the brain works holistically.

·        Voice recognition as amazing

·        How intelligence is defined.  (producing & comprehending speech)

 

 

Gibson, E.J., & Walk, R.D. (1960).  The “visual cliff,” Scientific American, 202(4), 67-71.

 

Stimulus:  This classic paper describes the development of an “elegant” methodology to study depth perception in infant humans and infrahumans.  It consists of a table with a thick glass top.  On the “shallow” side, the organism sees a checkerboard pattern immediately below the glass.  On the “deep” side, the checkerboard pattern is on the floor, some three or four feet away.  In the middle is a wooden “bridge.”  The organism is placed on the bridge and then observed to see if he or she is willing to cross on the “deep” side.  Generally, the study finds that neonate organisms (newborns) have depth perception, particularly if such perception has survival value (it is less present in aquatic turtles, for example).  This ability is usually demonstrable when the organism is first able to locomote (move).  Interestingly, the researchers utilized a wide array of organisms to test on the visual cliff:  chickens, turtles, rats, baby goats…

 

Response:  The author of the text views this work as well-entrenched in the nature/nurture debate.  The “nativist” position sees depth perception as innate; the “empiricist” position describes it as developing as a result of experience. 

 

The rat’s inability to detect depth may not have been an inability at all; it may have attended to the glass immediately below its feet.  This may also have been true for the turtle.

 

The fact that young children did not fear the drop-off (due to a lowered heart rate) doesn’t mean that they did not perceive the depth, but that they did not fear it.

 

The idea of social referencing was interesting – checking on the mother’s emotional expression to reference their behavior.

 

Nature and nurture always interact.

 

 

Turnbull, C.M.  (1961).  Some observations regarding the experiences and behavior of the BaMbuti Pygmies.  American Journal of Psychology, 74, 304-308.  (This article was not in the text for Spring 2009)

 

Stimulus:  Turnbull’s classic piece shows how visual experiences were or are required for the development of certain perceptual constancies.  The chapter provides excellent coverage of the differences between sensation and perception.  “Sensations are the raw materials for perception; perception refers to how we take this jumble of sensations and create meaning.” (p. 36)

 

Response(s):  Turnbull reports noticing how his subject, Kenge, experienced perceptual confusion when they reached an area that “…had been cleared of trees for a missionary station.”  This was a rather cavalier treatment of the issue of deforestation and religious proselytizing.  It is embedded in the arrogance of imperialism and the ideology of Manifest Destiny. 

 

The report illustrates how “we” acquire our perceptual constancies.  We?  Or Kenge?  This may be an instance of over-generalizing. 

 

Importantly, the author notes that the Pygmies may have had a more highly developed ability for figure-ground relationships.  [Note my experience on safari]

 

Is the term Pygmies ascribed?  Pejorative?

 

A little, white lie:  “Psychologists have continually been informed about the underlying causes of human behavior by studying it across cultural borders and ethnic boundaries.”  (pp. 40-41).

 

Note importance of the reference list and how the truly amazing student would check a few things out for himself or herself.  How many of my students, for example, went to the library to check out one or more of the references cited at the end of the article?

 

 

 

Some notes on statistics and the importance of correlation.