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Perception

Perception

Perception is a fundamental psychological process that enables individuals to organize, interpret, and consciously experience sensory information. This process is crucial for understanding and interacting with the world around us. It includes both bottom-up and top-down processing, each playing a distinct role in how we perceive our environment.
Bottom-up processing begins at the sensory level, where receptors detect external environmental stimuli. These could include the tactile sensation of...

Graded Potential

Graded Potential

Graded potentials are localized fluctuations in the cell membrane's electrical charge, commonly found in the dendrites of neurons. The magnitude of these potential changes depends on the strength of the initiating stimulus. In a membrane at its resting potential, a graded potential signifies a voltage shift either above -70 mV or below -70 mV.
Graded potentials fall into two categories: depolarizing and hyperpolarizing. Depolarizing graded potentials typically occur when sodium (Na+) or...

Sensation

Sensation

Sensory receptors are specialized neurons that respond to specific types of external stimuli, initiating the process known as sensation. This occurs when sensory input, such as light entering the eye, is detected by these receptors, causing chemical changes in the cells of the retina. These cells then convert the sensory stimulus into action potentials that are transmitted to the central nervous system, a process termed transduction.
Absolute thresholds can quantify the sensitivity of sensory...

Subliminal Perception

Subliminal Perception

Subliminal perception refers to the processing of sensory information that occurs below the level of conscious awareness. Researchers study subliminal perception by presenting a stimulus, such as a word or image, very quickly, typically around 50 milliseconds. This rapid presentation is often followed by another stimulus, such as a pattern of dots or lines, which blocks further mental processing of the initial stimulus. As a result, if participants cannot identify the initial stimulus better...

Perceptual Constancy

Perceptual Constancy

Perceptual constancy is the ability to recognize that objects remain consistent and unchanged even when their appearance varies due to changes in sensory input. There are four main types of perceptual constancy: size constancy, shape constancy, color constancy, and brightness constancy.
Size constancy is the recognition that an object remains the same size, even when its image on the retina changes. For instance, a bus is perceived to be large enough to carry people, even if it looks tiny from...

Gestalt Principles of Perception

Gestalt Principles of Perception

Gestalt principles provide a framework for understanding how humans perceive objects as unified wholes within their context. These principles are essential in explaining the cognitive processes that make sense of complex visual stimuli by organizing them into coherent groups. One fundamental principle is proximity, which posits that objects located close to each other are perceived as a collective group. For instance, when dots are positioned near one another, the visual system interprets them...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Nov 18, 2025

Perceptual and Category Processing of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis' Dimension of Human Likeness: Some Methodological Issues

Perceptual and Category Processing of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis' Dimension of Human Likeness: Some Methodological Issues

Published on: June 3, 2013

Conscious perception can be both graded and discrete.

Jocelyn L Sy¹, Hui-Yuan Miao¹, René Marois¹

¹Department of Psychology.

Journal of Experimental Psychology. General

|February 4, 2021

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

The attentional blink impairs perception of the second target. This impairment can be a continuous decline or an all-or-none loss, depending on task demands.

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Last Updated: Nov 18, 2025

Perceptual and Category Processing of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis' Dimension of Human Likeness: Some Methodological Issues

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Published on: January 21, 2017

Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Perception

Background:

The attentional blink (AB) paradigm investigates conscious perception.
Debate exists on whether AB involves all-or-none information loss or a continuum of perceptual fidelity.

Purpose of the Study:

To determine if the attentional blink causes graded or discrete loss of information.
To investigate the influence of perceptual and central processing demands on AB.

Main Methods:

Used noisy orientation patterns as targets in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task.
Employed a continuous report paradigm to assess T2 orientation perception.
Applied discrete mixture and variable resource models to analyze response precision and guessing rates.

Main Results:

When targets shared orientation (perceptual competition), AB degraded T2 perception precision.
When tasks required feature switching (central demands), AB caused all-or-none T2 awareness impairment (increased guessing).
Statistical and model analyses confirmed that information loss can be graded or discrete based on processing demands.

Conclusions:

Attentional blink mechanisms depend on whether perceptual or central stages are taxed.
Findings reconcile conflicting theories on information loss from awareness.
Provides new insights into the attentional blink and conscious perception.