Emily Raymond

October 26th, 2015

In Class Lab 2; Psychology 101

Slide 1:
When you view the moon on the horizon it appears larger in size then when you would
normally see it high in the sky;because the moon appears to be larger than the
environment that surrounds it.This is simply because our brain is trying to understand
the size of an object and how far away our brain perceives it to be. This is called
Ebbinghaus Illusion, where identically sized objects appear to be different sizes when
placed in different surroundings. Another explanation could be Perceptual Constancy,
which is when physical objects are perceived as unvarying and consistent despite
changes in their appearance or in the physical environment.
Slide 2:
The reason we can perceive this image as both a young woman and an old woman is
because when first looking at this illusion we are in the Preattentive stage, which is
where we unconsciously accumulate information from the environment. In other
words our first impression of the image is what we see. In order to see the other
individual you need to be in the Focused attention stage. In this second stage, we
start to focus on other features of the object and emphasize the features that allow
us to see both the young woman and old woman.
Slide 3:
We perceive image 3 as an impossible figure when we process it in a Top-Down
Processing Format because our perception is guided by what we already have
knowledge of or are comfortable with. Based on that, the figure looks wrong because
the foreground and background are backwards and our cortex(brain) has no prior
knowledge to the foreign object we are looking at. Although when looking at the
image with Bottom-Up Processing we can break the figure down into separate
components and process them separately in order to understand the image and
complete it in our minds.
Slide 4:
When looking at the painting Forever Always" using Top-Down processing format i
automatically noticed two elderlies looking passionately into one an others eyes. This
is because my brain is developing an image that Im already comfortable with.
Although when i look at this painting using Bottom-Up processing format i noticed
much more within the image. I noticed a female holding something on her head sitting
next to a man playing a guitar. The woman appears to be sitting in front of a sheet
blowing in the wind with a glass bottle beside her, and the man appears to be in a

street like setting with another woman emerging from a door. Lastly what i noticed
was a golden yellow chalice sitting in the dead centre of the whole painting.