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Psychology Ch.4
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| perception in which the way we perceive a stimulus doesn't match its physical reality | illusion |
| detection of physical energy by sense organs, which then send information to the brain | sensation |
| the brain's interpretation of raw sensory inputs | perception |
| the first step in sensation; converting external energies or substances into a "language" the nervous system understands, such as electrical signals within neurons | transduction |
| specialized cell responsible for converting external stimuli into neural activity for a specific sensory system | sense receptor |
| for all senses, activation is greatest when we first detect a stimulus, after which our response declines in strength | sensory adaptation |
| study of how we perceive sensory stimuli based on their physical characteristics | psychophysics |
| the lowest level of a stimulus that we can detect on 50 percent of the trials when no other stimuli of that type are present | absolute threshold |
| the smallest change in the intensity of a stimulus that we can detect | JND just noticeable difference |
| there is a constant proportional relationship between the JND and the original stimulus intensity. (stronger the stimulus, the bigger change needed for it to be noticed) | Weber's law |
| describes how we detect stimuli under uncertain conditions | signal detection theory |
| tendencies to make one type of guess over another when we're in doubt about whether a weak signal is present or absent under noisy conditions | response biases |
| the sensation we experience is determined by the nature of the sense receptor, not the stimulus | specific nerve energies |
| vivid sensations of light caused by pressure on your eye's receptor cells | phosphenes |
| rare condition in which people experience cross-modal sensations | synesthesia |
| the ability to attend to many sense modalities simultaneously (bottom up and top down) | parallel processing |
| set formed when expectations influence perceptions | perceptual set |
| the process by which we perceive stimuli consistently across varied conditions (3 kinds, shape, size, color) | perceptual constancy |
| allows us to select one sensory channel and turn off the others | selective attention |
| views attention as a bottleneck through which info passes | filter theory of attention |
| ability to pick out an important message | cocktail party effect |
| failure to detect stimuli that are in plain sight when our attention is focused elsewhere | inattentional blindness |
| failure to detect obvious changes in one's environment | change blindness |
| problem describing how our brains connect info together to perceive a whole | binding problem |
| colored part of the eye - controls how much light enters the eye | iris |
| circular hole through which light enters the eye | pupil |
| curved, transparent layer covering the iris and pupil - bends light to focus incoming visual image at back of the eye | cornea |
| bends light, but changes curvature to fine tune the image; accomodation, allows you to judge distances | lens |
| thin membrane at the back of the eye. "movie screen" | retina |
| central part of retina which is responsible for acuity (sharpness); if it is damaged we can't see straight on | fovea |
| long and narrow cells in the fovea that allow us to see in the dark | rods |
| give us color vision | cones |
| the time it takes rods to gain their maximum sensitivity to light | dark adaptation |
| nerve that travels from the retina to the brain | optic nerve |
| place where the optic nerve connects to the retina | blind spot |
| our ability to use certain minimal patterns to identify objects using feature detection cells to see lines and edges | feature detection |
| Gestalt principles | proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, symmetry, figure-ground |
| Gestalt: objects physically close to each other tend to be perceived as unified wholes | proximity |
| Gestalt: we see similar objects as comprising a whole, much more so than dissimilar objects | similarity |
| Gestalt: we still perceive objects as wholes, even if other objects block part of them | continuity |
| Gestalt: when partial visual info is present, our brains fill in what's missing | closure |
| Gestalt: we perceive objects that are symmetrically arranged as whole more often than those that aren't | symmetry |
| Gestalt: we usually focus our attention on what we believe to be the central figure, and ignore the background | figure-ground |
| an image we can perceive two ways | bistable image |
| the ability to see spatial relations in 3 dimensions | depth perception |
| depth cue that relies on one eye alone | monocular depth cues (relative size, texture gradient, interposition, light and shadow) |
| depth cue that relies on two eyes | binocular depth cues (disparity, convergence) |
| our sense of hearing | audition |
| corresponds to the frequency of a wave (hertz) | pitch |
| the amplitude (height) of the sound wave (decibels) | loudness |
| the quality/complexity o the sound | timbre |
| funnels sound waves onto the eardrum; comprised of pinna | outer ear |
| transmits sound from eardrum to inner ear; comprised of ossicles - hammer, anvil, stirrup | middle ear |
| sound is converted from vibrations to neural activity | innner ear |
| spiral shaped organ in ear; filled with a thick fluid - balance | cochlea |
| tissue containing the hair cells necessary for hearing | organ of Corti |
| membrane supporting the organ of Corti and hair cells in cochlea | basilar membrane |
| specific place along the basilar membrane matches a tone with a specific pitch | place theory |
| airborne chemicals that interact with receptors in the lining of our nasal passages | odors |
| tastes we can detect: | sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami |
| sense receptor in the tongue that responds to tastes | taste buds |
| odorless chemicals that serve as social signals of members of one's species that alter our sexual behavior | pheromones |
| system we use for touch and pain | somatosensory |
Created by:
rlhaas
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