ShmoopTube

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And here's your shmoop du jour brought to you by dogs they make

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life a little less rough. we know that joke tickled your funny bone [woman playing with a dog]

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here's the question..Mary sees the dog as separate from the bone it is chewing

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which of the following explains what she sees and here are your potential answers....

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Our brains are pretty cool think about it they help us [People at a beach with brains for heads]

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interpret and understand all the visual stimuli in the world quickly and

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accurately so instead of being visually overwhelmed all the time we can focus on

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the more important things in life like a test prep, see what we did there alright let's [Girl preparing for a test]

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get started could Mary's brain be engaging in A) bottom-up processing well

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bottom-up processing describes our ability to pick up various features of

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stimuli and put them together to make sense of them we see fur, four legs

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floppy ears and voila we know that what we're looking at is a sweet little pup [puppy in the street]

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but if we happen to have seen a lost werewolf poster in the area recently

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well then maybe we'd perceive this innocent and playful dog as a dangerous [puppy transforms into a beast]

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beast this would be top-down processing which describes when we take our

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knowledge and expectations to help interpret our sensory stimuli neither of

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these however have to do with distinguishing the dog from her bone so

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we can cross out A) and B) what about D) shape constancy well this concept

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refers to our ability to perceive the shape of a given object as constant [shape constancy definition]

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despite our view angle changing so if we look at the dog from this angle and then [Woman looking at a dog]

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this angle our brain knows that the shape hasn't changed but that our

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perspective or angle has, it's a way of contextualizing the object and our

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perceptions in order to make sense of our surroundings similarly if we were to [Dog sitting down]

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view the dog in this light and then this light our mind understands that the

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object itself isn't becoming more or less bright but instead that the light [Dog surrounded by colorful lighting]

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around it is changing well both of these constancy's allow us to make sense of

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the world in a simple way or otherwise the constant growing and shrinking and [Magician makes woman grow and shrink]

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color changing would make us wonder if we fell down a rabbit hole but neither are

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our answers that must mean that Mary's perception can be described by [Mary thinking]

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C) figure ground relationship when discussing the ability to discern

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between objects we're talking about figure ground relationship first [Dog chewing a toy]

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explained by Gestalt psychologists it describes how we automatically perceive

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an object as a separate entity from its surroundings the figure cute little pup

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here is the center of our attention so we're able to perceive it as separate [Puppy dog carrying a bone in its mouth]

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from the background and in turn the bone so C) is the correct answer that was

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the best test prep video ever right right come on now throw a dog a bone

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here... [Girl holding a test prep book]

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