Invitation to Psychology

218 Chapter 6 Sensation and Perception

As you can see... well, what you see partly

depends on the culture you live in! When travelers

visit another culture and are surprised to find that

its members “see things differently,” they may be

literally correct.

groups reported the same numbers of details about

the fish, but the Japanese remembered more details

about everything else in the background (Masuda

& Nisbett, 2001). If it doesn’t move, one of the re-

searchers concluded, most Americans don’t see it.

Recite & Review

Recite: Draw on all your senses to report everything you can remember about the visual cliff,

critical periods in perceptual development, psychological influences on perception, and cultural

influences on perception.

Review: Next, go back and reread this section.

Now focus on taking this Quick Quiz:

1. On the visual cliff, most 6-month-old babies (a) go right across because they cannot detect
   depth, (b) cross even though they are afraid, (c) will not cross because they can detect depth,
   (d) cry or get bored.


2. Newborns and infants (a) have few perceptual abilities, (b) need visual experiences during a
   critical period for vision to develop normally, (c) see as well as adults.


3. “Have a nice...” says Trevor, but then he gets distracted and doesn’t finish the thought. Yet
   Chava is sure she heard Trevor wish him a nice day. Why?
   Answers:

Study and Review at MyPsychLab

perceptual set 3. b2. c1.

You are about to learn...

•    that perception is often unconscious.

•    whether “subliminal perception” recordings will

help you lose weight or reduce stress.

perception Without

awareness Lo 6.28

Being consciously aware of every single thing we

see, hear, touch, or even smell in the course of a

day would be impossible. Much of our perception

occurs without our conscious awareness yet none-

theless influences our behavior.

Behavior can be affected even by stimuli that

are so weak or brief that they are below a person’s

absolute threshold for detecting them—that is,

subliminal. People sometimes correctly sense a

change in a scene (say, in the color or location of

an object) even though the change took place too

quickly to be consciously recognized and identi-

fied (Rensink, 2004). And when people are sub-

liminally exposed to a face, they will tend to prefer

that face over one they did not “see” in this way

(Bornstein, Leone, & Galley, 1987).

Thus, people often know more than they

know they know. In fact, nonconscious processing

occurs not only in perception but also in memory,

thinking, and decision making, as we discuss in

Chapters 7 and 8. However, subliminal perception

can be hard to demonstrate and replicate. The

strongest evidence for its existence comes from

studies using simple stimuli (faces or single words

such as bread) rather than complex stimuli such

as sentences (“Eat whole wheat bread, not white

bread, if you know what’s good for you”).

If subliminal exposure to stimuli can affect

judgments and preferences in the laboratory, you

may be wondering whether it can be used to

manipulate people’s attitudes and behavior in or-

dinary life. Subliminal persuasion techniques first

became a hot topic way back in the 1950s, when

an advertising executive claimed to have increased

popcorn and Coke sales at a theater by secretly

flashing the words EAT POPCORN and DRINK

COKE on the movie screen. The claim turned out

to be a hoax, devised to save the man’s struggling

advertising company.