10 7 15 PSY 317 Notes Extra Credit Opportunity A psychology student named Ashley visited the class to introduce a study she is conducting She passed out an informational sheet about an online survey based on Facial Attractiveness Follow the instructions on screen Everything is anonymous so make sure to print physical evidence of completion to hand in to Dr Miller for extra credit Housekeeping The next homework assignment is currently due on Oct 14th but it is possible that Dr Miller will push that date back Recap Feature Nets and Word Recognition Network Theory for how the brain might work o Activation level lowest level of network that activates upper levels of the network o Thresholds point at which the node will fire changeable variable o Resting Activation level at which things in the activation level are at the current moment changeable variable Vague description but think of it like this Some people are quicker to react negatively to a stimulus than others Ex Their anger juice container is already at a default of being almost full when that stimulus is presented while the other person s anger juice container requires more stimulus to boil over because their container has a lower default amount o In this situation the threshold would be the point at which the anger juice boils over Both the threshold and the resting activation levels can be changed they are independent variables Recognizing a Word Brain sees different shapes that compose a letter corresponding node from the activation level will fire and form the letter more nodes will fire and form sequence of letters brain recognizes the letters as a word Letter Word Frequency and Priming o Resting activation of a feature detector Influenced by frequency or recency Well formedness o Additional layer with common letter groupings or letter pairs Uncommon letter combinations would require greater activation Ex TZ FK SZ 10 7 15 Confusion Error Feature Nets and Word Recognition cont With brief presentation all features might not be seen o Letters with similar features may be equally activated However more common letters will have a higher resting activation and or lower threshold that causes CO to be activated Bias and Recognition errors o The feature net can explain confusion over a stimulus through bias and similarity errors people make Uncommon name spellings People tend to spell names with the more common spelling or with more common letter combinations o Casey v Kaycie Katie v Cady Ashley v Ashleigh etc Seeing Shapes Recognition by Components RBC Model o Can be envisioned as a neural network Like feature net o Assume that all objects are made up of rough shapes geons Geons are the most basic three dimensional shapes Cubes spheres pyramids cones cylinders polygons etc Benefits o Viewpoint Independent the angle of an object is not We recognize objects as combinations of geons necessary you can still recognize it Ex A coffee mug is a hollow cylinder with a skinny bendy solid View based Recognition cylinder on the side o Different from the RBC theory o View point dependent o Proposes that different views of an object are stored in memory Limited storage think of you brain like a hard drive on the camera you only want to store the essential images of orientation not all the other useless fluff that doesn t make sense One must rotate the view so that it lines up with the view you are seeing The more rotation that is required the longer recognition will take