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CWI PSYC 101 Chap 5
Psychology in Everday Life by David G Myers
Question | Answer |
---|---|
the process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system take in stimulus energies from our environment | sensation |
the process by which our brain organizes and interprets sensory information, transforming it into meaningful objects and events | perception |
changing one form of energy into another. In sensation, the transforming of stimulus energies, such as sights, sounds, and smells, into neural impulses our brains can interpret | transduction |
the minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50 percent of the time | absolute threshold |
below our absolute threshold for conscious awareness | subliminal |
activating, often unconsciously, associations in our mind, thus setting us up to perceive or remember objects or events in certain ways | priming |
the minimum difference between two stimuli required for detection 50 percent of the time. We experience the difference threshold as a just noticeable difference (or jnd) | difference threshold |
the principle that, to be perceived as different, two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum proportion (rather than a constant amount) | Weber's law |
reduced sensitivity in response to constant stimulation | sensory adaptation |
the distance from the peak of one light or sound wave to the peak of the next | wavelength |
the dimension of color that is determined by the wavelength of light; what we know as the color names blue, green, and so forth | hue |
the amount of energy in a light or sound wave, which we perceive as brightness or loudness, as determined by the wave's amplitude | intensity |
the light-sensitive inner surface of the eye; contains the receptor rods and cones plus layers of neurons that begin the processing of visual information | retina |
retinal receptors that detect black, white, and gray; necessary for peripheral and twilight vision, when cones don't respond | rods |
retinal receptor cells that are concentrated near the center of the retina; in daylight or well-lit conditions, cones detect fine detail and give rise to color sensations | cones |
the nerve that carries neural impulses from the eye to the brain | optic nerve |
the point at which the optic nerve leaves the eye; this part of the retina is "blind" because it has no receptor cells | blind spot |
the processing of many aspects of a problem or scene at the same time; the brain's natural mode of information processing for many functions, including vision | parallel processing |
nerve cells in the brain that respond to specific features of a stimulus, such as edges, lines, and angles | feature detectors |
the senses or act of hearing | audition |
the number of complete wavelengths that pass a point in a given time (for example, per second) | frequency |
a tone's experienced highness or lowness; depends on frequency | pitch |
a coiled, bony, fluid-filled tube in the inner ear; sound waves traveling through the cochlear fluid trigger nerve impulses | cochlea [KOHK-lee-uh] |
a social interaction in which one person ( the hypnotist) suggests to another (the subject) that certain perceptions, feelings, thoughts, or behaviors will spontaneously occur | hypnosis |
the principle that one sense may influence another, as when the smell of food influences its taste | sensory interaction |
the system for sensing the position and movement of individual body parts | kinesthesis |
the sense of body movement and position, including the sense of balance | vestibular sense |
an organized whole. ____ psychologists emphasized our tendency to integrate pieces of information into meaningful wholes. | gestalt |
the organization of the visual field into objects (the figures) that stand out from their surroundings (the ground) | figure-ground |
the perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into meaningful groups | grouping |
the ability to see objects in three dimensions, although the images that strike the retina are two-dimensional; allows us to judge distance | depth perception |
a laboratory device for testing depth perception in infants and young animals | visual cliff |
depth cues, such as retinal disparity, that depend on the use of two eyes | binocular cues |
a binocular cue for perceiving depth: By comparing images from the two eyeballs, the brain computes distance - the greater the disparity (difference) between the two images, the closer the object | retinal disparity |
depth cues, such as interposition and linear perspective, available to either eye alone | monocular cues |
perceiving objects as unchanging (having consistent color, brightness, shape, and size) even as illumination and retinal images change | perceptual constancy |
perceiving familiar objects as having consistent color, even if changing illumination alters the wavelengths reflected by the object | color constancy |
in vision, the ability to adjust to an artificially displaced or even inverted visual field | perceptual adaptation |
a mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another | perceptual set |
the controversial claim that perception can occur apart from sensory input, such as through telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition | extrasensory perception (ESP) |