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Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Perception

Video Exercises

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Seeing Hungry

Why does food look more appealing when you are hungry? Scientists are finding that the same chemical in your stomach that causes hunger also changes how your brain perceives food, as this ScienCentral News video explains.

Interviewee: Alain Dagher, Montreal Neurological Institute, Canada

Copyright © ScienCentral, Inc., with extra footage courtesy Alain Dagher and the Culinary Institute of America.

Use this video to explore psychology themes as they apply to a single research project.

1.
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Psychology is an empirical science.
If “psychology is an empirical science,” then psychologists must be willing to test their theories using the scientific method. How does Dr. Dagher test his idea that ghrelin influences how we think?
2.
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Nature and nurture are inextricably entwined.
If humans had a gene that governed the amount of ghrelin produced by an individual, how might genes (nature) influence differences in behavior and thinking (nurture)? Incidentally, there is a gene (called GHRL) that codes for production of ghrelin. This gene is located on Chromosome 3 in humans.
3.
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The brain and mind are inseparable.
Does the feeling of hunger (mind) come first and then the ghrelin (body)? Or does the ghrelin (body) come before the hunger (mind)? In understanding this issue, do you prefer to think of the mind and body as separate and distinct or do, or do you prefer to think that the mind is the brain’s subjective experience? Which is the approach preferred by most modern scientists?
4.
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The new biological revolution is energizing research.
Brain imaging technology in this kind of research has only been available for a bit more than a decade. Similarly, ghrelin, like many other important hormones and neurotransmitters, was discovered very recently (1999 for ghrelin). If you take the neuroimaging results and the hormone ghrelin out of this video, what is left that to help us understand hunger?
5.
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The mind is adaptive.
According to your book, an adaptation is a physical characteristic, skill or ability that increases an organism’s chances to survive and reproduce. According to the video, what mental processes are affected by ghrelin and how might activating those processes improve an individual’s chances to survive?
6.
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Psychological science crosses levels of analysis.
Which levels of analysis discussed are found in the video about ghrelin?
7.
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We are often unaware of the multiple influences on how we think, feel, and act.
How interesting is the picture below? Think about your answer on the following scale.

Not very interesting <-------------------> Very interesting

[IMAGE]

According to the video, what are some factors that might influence a person’s answer that he or she might not be aware of? To answer this, think of what you could do to increase or decrease their interest ratings.
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Golf and Perception

Psychologists have found that golfers who’ve played well perceive the hole as bigger than it really is. As this ScienCentral video explains, the researchers also found those who did poorly saw the hole as smaller than it really is.

Interviewees: Jessica Witt, Purdue University?and Steven Jeffers, Amateur Golfer

Copyright © ScienCentral, Inc.

We usually like to think that we see things just as they are. This video suggests that we may be fooling ourselves. Our experiences may interact with our perceptions to influence what we think we see.

8.
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Dr. Witt simply asked golfers to look at a number of different circles on a poster. They were asked to choose which one was closest to the actual size of a golf hole (which is actually standardized at 10.8 cm). Which golfers chose circles that were larger than the actual size and which chose circles smaller than the actual size?
9.
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Your textbook discusses two brain pathways involved in processing visual information. What pathway and, based on that choice, what lobe of the cortex are probably most involved in making the size judgment?
10.
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In of your textbook, two different kinds of information processing are discussed: bottom-up and top-down. Although both types of processing are involved in any visual task, which of these two types of information processing would be more likely to be invoked to explain the judgments made by the golfers reported in this video? Justify your answer.
11.
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Dr. Witt conducted earlier research (not reported in the video) with softball players. Given her findings in the golf study, what do you expect she should found to be the relationship between these softball players’ batting averages and their judgments of the size of a softball?
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Vote for You!

Researchers have shown that voters can be swayed toward choosing a candidate by making the candidate look more like the voter. These visual manipulations were unnoticed, but were enough to swing the 2004 presidential election. The implications of the research go beyond digital manipulation and give a deeper insight into this year’s heated race for the White House.

Interviewee: Jeremy Bailenson, Stanford University

Copyright © ScienCentral, Inc. Morph images courtesy Nick Yee, Stanford University.

How do you make decisions in your life? For instance, how do you decide which candidate in an election to support?

12.
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If people’s voting followed a “normative model,” how would they decide whom to vote for?
13.
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Descriptive models focus on ways we are not rational deciders. They often use heuristics to decide. The textbook defines a heuristic this way: “A heuristic is a shortcut used to reduce the amount of thinking that is needed to move from an initial state to a goal state.” Let’s imagine that people are using a heuristic to decide whom to vote for. In this video, what is their initial state and what is their goal state?
14.
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Now try to put into words the heuristic that people seem to be using in this study. In other words, what is the basis on which people are choosing the candidate they will support?

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