What You See Is What You’ve Learned

1. What You See Is What You’ve Learned Addison Leong

2. A Little Background • Sensation refers to the information you are constantly receiving from your environment • Perception refers to the ways in which the brain manipulates this information: • Select the sensation to focus on • Organize the information into recognition • Interpret the organized information

3. The Method • Colin Turnbull, anthropologist who published the study, used naturalistic observation • Over the course of a day, Turnbull brought a Pygmy named Kenge out of the forest (the Inturi Forest in Zaire) that he had never left • Because of the forest, Kenge had never seen far distances before.

4. High quality images of trees

5. Findings • Note nature-nurture • Suggests that environment, or nurture, contributes to perceptual development • Later kitten experiment by Blakemore and Cooper (1970) • There is no particular source of our perceptual abilities

6. Issues • Conclusion is based on only one case study • Cannot tell whether study results are universally applicable • Turnbull had no hypotheses, clear scientific method, and was not even a psychologist

7. That’s All, Folks! Remember: Don’t keep children in the dark. It makes them think that cows a mile away are insects.