Ch. 3- Sensation & Perception Flashcards
Explain sensation:
Process by which a stimulated sensory receptor creates a pattern of neural messages that represent the stimulus in the brain
Explain perception:
Process that makes sensory patterns meaningful
How does stimulation become sensation?
The brain senses the world indirectly because the sense organs convert stimulation into neural messages
Specialized neurons that are activated by stimulation and transduce (convert) the incoming stimulus into electrochemical signals
Sensory Receptors
What is transduction?
Sensory process that converts the information carried by a physical stimulus into the form of neural messages
What do neural impulses carry?
The codes of sensory events in a form that can be further processed by the brain
What is a sensory pathway?
Bundles of neurons that carry info from the sense organs to the brain
What is the absolute thresh-hold?
The minimum amount of stimulation necessary for a stimulus to be detected
Smallest amount by which a stimulus can be changed and the difference can be detected
Difference Thresh hold/ JND
What is Weber’s Law?
The size of the JND is proportional to the intensity of the stimulus
Explain the signal detection theory:
Sensation depends on the characteristics of the stimulus, the background stimulation, and the detector
How are the senses alike/difference?
The senses all operate in much the same way, but each extracts different information and sends it to its own specialized processing regions in the brain.
Synesthesia is…
Mixing sense (ex: tasting music, hearing color)
What is the relationship between sensation and perception?
Perception brings meaning to sensation; so perception produces an interpretation of the world, not a perfect representation of it.
What are the two pathways of the brain?
Temporal-what
Parietal-where
Blindsight means damage to…
The “what” pathway-makes people unaware of objects
the “what”pathway identifies ______.
The “where pathway identifies ______.
- What an object is and what the context is
2. Location of an object
Cells in the cortex that specialize in detection of specific stimulus features
Feature detectors
Unsolved mystery concerning the processes used by the brain to combine many aspects of sensation into a single percept
Binding problem
Taking sensory info and then assembling and integrating it
Bottom-up processing
Using models, ideas, and expectations to interpret sensory information
Top-down processing
What is a perceptual constancy?
Ability to recognize the same object under different conditions, such as changes in illumination, distance, or location
Don’t notice unexpected changes (gorilla thing)
Inattentional blindness
Don’t notice a difference from before
Change blindness
Demonstrably incorrect experience of a stimulus pattern; shared by others in the same perceptual environment
Illusions
What is the law of Prägnanz?
Brain tries to make things simple
View that perception is primarily shaped by prior learning and experience
Learning-based inference
Readiness to detect a particular stimulus in a given context
Perceptual Set
