I studied psychology at Cardiff University, and as part of that we covered perception. I achieved only a DipHE, due to my mental health, so I am not yet a psychologist. I am currrently studying the Open Degree at the Open University, in which I am hoping to re-study perception, and then go on to read a psychology conversion course, ideally at Cardiff.
Looking back at my studies at Cardiff University, perception was my favourite area of psychology, followed by brain imaging. Concepts like conditioning are central to understand well, but I do not find them engaging – they are very dry to me, and rather dull.
When it comes to the study of the sensory system however, it’s very difficult, but really intriguing. It’s so interesting to me how we make sense of the world around us, and the information coming into our brain from that world. Through our vision, taste, touch etc. Psychophysics is the study of these systems and the brain regions that process them.
I’m intrigued as to how these differ in PDAers. The sensory system can be used to explain some of the differences in Autistic individuals – unfortunately usually in terms of deficits. I don’t believe any research like this has been done on our population, and I do wonder if there may be clues as to why we experience demand anxiety within these systems.
In Autistics, a major difference is that we use “priors” differently. A prior is a concept from Bayesian probability, something humans are very bad at when undertaking it consciously, but may well use very easily intuitively within our sensory processing for example. We usually make use of prior likelihoods about the world to process what we are likely receiving input from – but Autistics weight this much less heavily, making less use of these – I will add a citation to this shortly, after accessing my iPad.
This is used to explain some of the differences experienced in Autism. I shall need to re-read the paper before summarising that here, but I will attempt to do that shortly (if PDA allows!).
I also wish to create infographics about perception – particularly the Bayesian Perception that differs – on my instagram.
PDA fae 