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Detecting physical energy from the environment and encoding it as neural signals
Sensation
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Selecting, organizing, and interpreting our sensations
Perception
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What is bottom-up processing?
Sensory analysis that starts at the entry level (begins with sensory receptors)
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What is top-down processing?
Constructing perceptions drawing on bottom-up processing and on experience and expectations.
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The minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the time
Absolute threshold
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Term for 'below one's absolute threshold for conscious awareness'?
Subliminal
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What is priming?
the activation of certain associations, thus predisposing one's perception, memory or responses.
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What is the minimum difference between 2 stimuli required for detection 50% percent of the time?
The difference threshold. (a just noticable difference.)
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Diminishing sensitivity to an unchanging stimulus
Sensory adaptation
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Sensory Transduction
conversion of one form of energy into another. The transforming of stimulus energies, such as sights and sounds, into neural impulses that our brains can interpret.
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What is wavelength and intensity, in respect to vision?
- Wavelength= determines hue
- Intensity= influences brightness (determined by wave amplitude)
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What are key parts of the eye, and what do they do?
- Cornea: protects eye and bends light to provide focus
- Pupil: light passes through the pupil, a small adjustable opening
- Iris: colored muscle surrounding the pupil; regulates pupil size and amount of light entering eye
- Lens: Focuses incoming rays into image on eye's light-sensitive back surface
- Retina: Light-sensitive inner surface
- Fovea: cones in eye cluster around it; retina's area of central focus
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Process by which the eye's lens changes shape to focus on near/far objects on the retina
Accomodation
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2 key parts of the retina:
- Rods: detect black, white, and gray; necessary for peripheral/twilight vision
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What is the optic nerve?
The nerve that carries neural impulses from the eye to the brain.
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What is parallel processing?
The brain constructs perception by doing several things at once (dividing visual scene into color, depth, etc. working on each aspect simultaneously)
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What is amplitude and frequency, in respect to hearing?
- Amplitude: strength of soundwaves= loudness
- Frequency: Wavelength variation= pitch
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What are key parts to the ear?
- Eardrum: membrane that vibrates with waves
- Middle ear: transmits eardrum's vibrations through a piston made of the hammer, anvil, and stirrup
- Cochlea: sound waves trigger nerve impulses
- Inner ear: contains cochlea, semicircular canals and vestibular sacs
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What is the signal detection theory?
predicts how/when we detect the presence of a faint stimulus amid background stimulation
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Compare and contrast conduction hearing loss and sensorineural hearing loss:
- Conduction hearing loss is caused by damage to the mechanical system that conducts sound waves to the cochlea;
- Sensorineural hearing loss is nerve deafness caused by damage to the cochlea's receptor cells
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What are the 4 skin senses?
Pressure, warmth, cold, and pain
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Gate-control theory:
the spinal cord contains neurological gates that blocks pain signals/allows them to pass to the brain
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What are the 5 tongue tastes?
Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami (monosodium glutamate)
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Idea that one sense may influence another sense (smell, taste, and texture)
Sensory interaction
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What is the sense of olfaction?
the sense of smell
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What is kinesthesis?
The sense of our body parts' position and movement
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Vestibular sense
the sense of body movement/position (including sense of balance)
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What is Gestalt?
an organized whole; Gestalt psychologists emphasize our tendency to integrate pieces of info into meaningful wholes
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What are some optical illusions/perceptual tendencies?
- Figure-ground: organization of visual field into objects that stand out from their surroundings
- Depth perception: ability to see objects in 3D
- Binocular cues: Depth cues (retinal disparity and convergence) that depend on use of 2 eyes
- Retinal disparity: brain computes distance; the greater the difference between 2 images, the closer the object
- Convergence: the extent to which the eyes verge inward when looking at an object (greater the inward strain, the closer the object)
- Context effects change our perceptions
- Lightness constancy: we percieve an object having constant lightness even when illumination varies
- Phi Phenomenon: illusion of movement created when 2+ adjacent lights blink on/off
- Perceptual adaptation: the ability to adjust to an inverted visual field
- Perceptual constancy: percieving objects as unchanging even as illumination/retinal images change
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Perceptual set:
a mental predisposition to percieve one thing and not the other
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