4.1 Flashcards
What is perception?
Attending to, organizing and interpreting stimuli that we sense, includes recognizing the sounds as human voices and understanding what we see
What is sensation?
The process of detecting external events by sense organs and turning those stimuli into neural signals, raw sensory info then relayed to the brain where perception occurs
What is transduction?
When raw sensations are detected by the sensory organs that are turned into information that the brain can process
What is sensory adaption?
The reduction of activity in sensory receptors with repeated exposure to a stimulus, which allows us to adapt to our surroundings
What are the two types of thresholds, and what do they do?
1) absolute threshold: the minimum amount of energy or quantity of a stimulus required for it to be reliably detected at least 50% of the time it is presented
2) difference threshold: the smallest difference between stimuli that can be reliably detected at least 50% of the time
What is signal detection?
It improves on simple thresholds by including the influence of psychological factors, such as expectations
What is Psychophysics?
The study of how physical events relate to psychological perceptions of those events
What are Gestalt’s 3 principals of perception?
1) FIGURE AND GROUND: people can choose what they focus on, and tune the other out
2) PROXIMITY & SIMILARITY: we see 2 rows of 6, in egg carton instead of 6 rows of 2
3) CONTINUITY: the perceptual rule where lines and objects tend to be continuous, instead of changing direction
What is divided attention?
Paying attention to more than one stimulus or task at the same time
What is selective attention?
Focusing on one particular event or task
What is inattentional blindness?
A failure to notice clearly visible even or objects because attention is directed somewhere else
