week 4 post 1: human abilities

 this week's lesson focused a lot on psychology especially sensation and perception 

Sensation and perception: auditory  

• We can discern noises based on both their pitch and their loudness. 

• our ears are remarkably good at localizing sound as well. 

• we can tell the difference between a nearby quiet sound and 

• a faraway loud sound. 

• Even if their relative pitches and loudness's are the same when they reach our ear. 

• Unlike vision, hearing isn't directional---> we can't close our ears or point our ears the wrong direction so We can't as easily filter out auditory information ---> might be useful for designing alerts, but it's problematic for overwhelming or sharing too much information with the people around us. 

 

Sensation and perception: haptic  

• our skin can feel things, it can't feel at a distance, but it can feel when things are touching right up against it. 

• It can feel a variety of different types of input, like pressure, vibration and temperature. 

• Like listening, we can't easily filter out touch feedback---> unlike listening, touch feedback is generally only available to the person it's touching, so it can be used to create more personal feedback. 

• Traditionally, touch feedback, or haptic feedback, has been very natural. 

• We can feel the keys go down as we press them on keyboard. 

• But with touchscreens, motion controls and virtual reality, touch needs to be more and more designed explicitly into the system if we're to use it. 

 

 

Memory: perceptual store 

• the greatest consensus is around the existence of at least these three kinds of memory 

• the first, the perceptual store or the working memory. 

• The perceptual store is a very short-term memory lasting less than a second. 
  

• One of the most common models of working memory came from Baddeley and Hitch in 1974. 

• They described it as having three parts. 

• First, there's the visuospatial sketchpad which holds visual information for active manipulation. 

• second part is the phonological loop. 

• The phonological loop is similar, but for verbal or auditory information, it stores the sounds or speech you've heard recently, such as the sound of me talking to you right now. 

• A third part is the episodic buffer. 

• The episodic buffer takes care of integrating information from the other systems as well as chronological ordering to put things in place. 

• all three of these are coordinated by a central executive. 

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