Psychology 3 Exam

• Wavelgnth is the distance from one wave peak to the next
• Intensity, the amount of energy in light waves (determined by amplitude) influences brightness
• The wavelength of light determines the color
• The higher the amplitude, the higher in the color spectrum are the colors seen

• Transduction is the change of energy
• Our eyes receive light energy and transduce it into neural signals that our brain then processes into what we see
• Changes visual information into stuff our brain can interpret
• As a transducer, the eye must detect and respond to the physical phenomenon of electromagnetic radiation in the wavelengths of the visible spectrum; and it must then transform that electromagnetic energy into a signal the nervous system can perceive and transmit

• The first visual structure
• Protects the eye and bends light to provide focus

• The iris separates the anterior and posterior sections of the eye
• The pupil perforates it
• The iris is the contractor muscle of the eye
• It regulates the amount of light let into the eye
• The iris is the colored region of the eye

• The pupil is the perforation of the iris
• Contracted to control the amount of light allowed to enter the eye
• The pupil contracts when light enters the eye and dilates when light is decreased
• The pupil also dilates when sexually aroused

To dilate their pupils

• No they are not
• Modern research says it did not work in terms in attracted, but made them “friendlier” and men wanted to talk to them more, but not date them more
• Researchers showed two identical pictures
• The subjects didn’t favor one over the other

• Protection of the eye
• Changes in shape to conform to changes in distance
• Allows us to focus on close or far objects
• Opens and shuts altering the amount of light let into the retina, and this changes the visual acuity of a person.

• The retina is a light sensitive inner surface of the eye
• Absorbs light and starts processing the image.

• The retina's area of central focus
• The fovea is the point at which maximum visual acuity is achieved
• The pit in the retina that allows more the maximum acuity in human vision.

• Located in periphery
• Rods are in charge of black and white vision
• Much more prevalent than cones (120 million)
• Sensitive in dim light
• Not responsible for detailed vision
• They allow us to have night vision where we lose detail in order to gain basic object shapes

• Most prevalent in the fovea
• Centrally located
• Cones are the color portions of the eye, allowing us to see colors
• They also provide detailed vision for us
• They are not sensitive to dim light, and they focus on the details in what we see\
• Less prevalent than rods (6 million)

Floaters are bits of material in the retina that cast a shadow on the retina

• The blind spot is the place where the optic nerve exits the eye
• There are no photoreceptors here
• The eye guesses what should be in the blind spot and the brain fills it in

• The retina receives the image from the light we perceive
• The optic nerve sends it to the thalamus
• Thalamus sends the information to the occipital lobe

• The retina doesn't see a whole image
• Rather its million of receptor cells convert particles of light energy into neural impulses and forward those to the brain
• The impulses are reassembled into a perceived, up-right image

• The Young-Helmholtz theory states that the eye has three different color receptors
• Red (~570), green (~530) and blue (~440) wavelengths
• The other colors are recognized as a combination of the three
• White has all the colors and cancels all of the color receptors out

• The opponent process theory states that opposing retinal processes enable color vision
• Cones feed into neurons that are excited or inhibited by cone pairs
• Red/green, blue/yellow, black/white
• This theory states that both of these processes can occur

• Feature detection is a process by which specialized nerve cells in the brain responds to specific features of a visual stimulus, such as lines, edges, angle, or movement
• The nerve cells fire selectively in response to stimuli that have specific characteristics

• Parallel processing is the ability to carry out multiple operations or tasks simultaneously
• The term is used in the contexts of both human cognition, particularly in the ability of the brain to simultaneously process incoming stimuli, and in parallel computing by machines

• Loudness is psychological term, measured on sons
• Amplitude is physical stimuli we receive

• The frequency correlates to pitch
• Frequency is the rate of which we receive sound waves
• Pitch is how we hear the sound

• The cochlea is the auditory portion of the inner ear
• This is the sensory organ of hearing

• Amplify sound waves and transduce auditory information to the Brain Stem
• If they are damaged, permanent hearing damage is induced

• Stiff structural element that separates two liquid-filled tubes that run along the coil of the cochlea
• Different frequencies are perceived in different areas, the vibrations are what allow us to hear

Our body's ability to synchronize over a time period of 24 hour day cycle

• Rapid eye movement sleep
• The heart rate increases, breathing increases
• Men can get erections, women increase wetness

• Place theory is a theory of hearing which states that our perception of sound depends on where each component frequency produces vibrations along the basilar membrane
• By this theory, the pitch of a musical tone is determined by the places where the membrane vibrates, based on frequencies corresponding to the tonotopic organization of the primary auditory neurons

• The brain reads pitch by monitoring the frequency of neural impulses traveling up the auditory nerve
• Frequency theory attempts to explain how the brain experiences sound waves
• While frequency theory is primarily a physiological theory that seeks to explain how the anatomical structure of the ear accounts for hearing, it is also a psychological theory that explores how sound is experienced by the mind

• The Doppler effect
• If the sound comes from the left, the right ear perceives it after the left ear
• Therefore we perceive the sound on the left instead of the right

• The issue of why people pay attention, how much they do and to what is often more referred to as selective attention
• In any busy scene, is it a classroom or a freeway, it’s virtually impossible to note everything at once
• What a person pays attention to in these circumstances is what they select to pay attention to, though it may be noted that selection is not necessarily conscious
• Selected attention can then be viewed as the process by which people find something upon which to concentrate, and the level of concentration they can continue to exert as distractions arise.

• The cocktail party effect describes the ability to focus one's listening attention on a single talker among a mixture of conversations and background noises, ignoring other conversations
• The effect enables people to talk in a noisy place
• For example, when conversing in a noisy crowded party, people can still listen and understand the person they are talking with, and can simultaneously ignore background noise and conversations
• Nevertheless, if someone calls out their name from across the room, people will immediately notice

• In visual perception, change blindness is the phenomenon that occurs when a person viewing a visual scene apparently fails to detect large changes in the scene
• For change blindness to occur, the change in the scene typically has to coincide with some visual disruption such as a saccade (eye movement) or a brief obscuration of the observed scene or image
• Example: monkey Youtube video

• Change deafness relates to the inability to detect changes between two voices during the allocation of attention
• A similar condition is change blindness

• The blindness YouTube video
• We create blind situations for ourselves by perceiving situations and not focusing on other situations

• The Necker Cube is an ambiguous line drawing
• It is a wire-frame drawing of a cube in oblique perspective, which means that parallel edges of the cube are drawn as parallel lines in the picture
• When two lines cross, the picture does not show which is in front and which is behind
• This makes the picture ambiguous; it can be interpreted two different ways
• When a person stares at the picture, it will often seem to flip back and forth between the two valid interpretations

• We perceive objects as distinct from their surroundings
• The organization of the visual field into object (the figures) that stand out from their surroundings (the ground)

• The vase and the face are interchangeable
• Depending on which is chosen as the base and which is chosen as the face, a different object is seen

• Gestalt said that the whole is different that the sum of its par
• A football team of all amazing players that hasn’t played together < a team that isn’t as skilled but has played together.

We group nearly figures together

We group similar figures together

We perceive smooth, continuous patterns rather than discontinuous ones

We fill in gaps to create a complete whole object

We perceive linked objects as a single unit

• The first cue is retinal disparity
• By comparing the different images from the two eyes the brain computes distances
• The great the differences between the two images, the closer the objects appear
• The second is convergence, which is the extent at which the eyes converge inward when looking at an object
• The closer an object, the more the convergence

• Relativity – the closer the object, the bigger it appears
• Interposition – if an object partially blocks our view of another object, we perceive it as closer
• Relative clarity – Hay objects appear farther away than sharp, clear objects
• Relative height – we perceive objects in our field of vision as further away
• Linear perspective – parallel lines appear to converge with distance
• Shadow – the visual system assumes light comes from above

San illusion of movement created when two or more adjacent lights blink on and off in succession

Perceiving objects an unchanging even as the retinal image changes

• A mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another
• Due to experience, assumptions and expectations

• The person could perceive color and figure ground
• They have trouble identifying shape and distance

The ability to adjust to an artificially displaced or inverted visual field

• ESP
• The ability to extend over our senses and sense the non-existing such as thoughts or predicting the future

The study of the evidence for psychological phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis, that are inexplicable by science

Mind to mind communication

Remote viewing, perceiving remote events. Seeing events in other areas.

Perceiving future events

• Paranormal but not perception
• Mind affecting matter
• “Whoever has telekinesis, please raise my hand.”

• Weird stuff happens by chance
• They also don’t notice disconfirming evidence

• There is a receiver and a sender
• The receiver receives the signal from a person in the other room
• The sender sends the signal of a picture to their receiver

• There was a 25% chance the receiver was right
• Many studies found 35%
• We have to wait a few years to make sure other labs are doing it properly
• Most psychologists now believe there is no reliable (replicable) evidence anyone posses ESP

Most psychologists now believe there is no reliable (replicable) evidence anyone posses ESP

Our awareness of our environment and ourselves

Consciousness moves, flows, and changes

Some activities require more consciousness than others

• Require alert awareness, attention, and interfere with ongoing activities
• They are performed serially and one process at a time
• They are performed slowly.

Occur with little awareness, require minimal attention, and do not interfere with ongoing activities.

• Appears in steps or arrangements
• Appearing in successive parts or numbers.

Simultaneous processing of different actions at one time

A young adult daydreams much more than an adult

1/3rd of the waking time is spent daydreaming

• Tested by giving subjects a pager or computer
• They get paged asking what are they doing, feeling, or thinking
• Experience sampling

Can help relax, endure frustration, and alleviate boredom, rehearsing possible approaches to problems

People who imagine and recall experiences with lifelike vividness and spend considerable time fantasizing

• Spend half their waking life daydreaming
• Para-identities such as past lives, imaginary children, fantasy worlds
• Psychic experiences, out of body, receive special messages

4%

Half of their waking life

A social interaction in which on person suggests to another that certain perceptions, feelings, thoughts, or behaviors will spontaneously occur

Minimize external distractions, encourage concentration on only the suggested stimuli, and encourage the belief that the subject is about to enter a special state of consciousness

Enriched fantasies, cognitive passivity, hypersensitive attention, reduced reality testing

Anesthesia, hallucinations, age regression, enhanced memory, posthypnotic suggestion, disinhibition

Yes, major changes in the brain state

• Some things can be done while hypnotized that cannot be done while in a normal state
• Some brain changes occur when asking the person to not see blue; the hypnotized person doesn’t see blue

During hypnosis our consciousness divides into two streams one is dissociating from the other)

A hypnotized awareness of experiences that go unreported during hypnosis

• Near death experiences are like those of temporal lobe seizures
• Replay of old memories, out-of-body experiences, sensations and visions of tunnels of light
• Oxygen deprivation can produce hallucinations with light tunnel visions
• Some people become nicer, calmer after experiencing a near death experience

Psychoactive drugs are chemicals what change perceptions and moods though their actions at the neural synapses

• 1) Addictive drugs quickly corrupt
• First time addiction rates are extremely low, 32% tobacco, 9% marijuana
• 2) Addiction cannot be overcome voluntarily, therapy is required
• Most of America’s 41 million ex-smokers kicked the habit themselves
• 3) We can extend the concept of addiction over to cover not just drug dependencies but a whole spectrum of repetitive, pleasure-seeking behaviors
• We can, but shouldn’t

• Tolerance is the user building up a tolerance, making it so that the user must take more and more of the drug to get the desired effect
• The user’s brain adapts its chemistry to offset the effect of the drug

• As the body responds to a drug’s absence, the user may feel physical pain and intense cravings (physical)
• Psychological drugs can become an important part of the user’s life, reliving stress or negative emotions

• Pleasurable – initial high followed by relaxation and disinhibition
• Adverse – depression, memory loss, organ damage, impaired reactions and judgment

• Pleasurable – Euphoria, alertness, energy, emotional elevation, and disinhibition
• Adverse – Irritability, insomnia, hypertension, seizures, dehydration, overheating, depressed mood, impaired cognitive and immune functioning

• Pleasurable - Enhanced sensation, relief of pain, distortion of time, relaxation
• Adverse - Damage to lungs, impaired learning and memory, increased risk of psychological disorders