Ch. 4: Perception Flashcards
What are agnosias?
A disability in which an individual has difficulty recognizing or perceiving certain kinds of objects.
What is amplitude?
The length from the trough of a wave to its crest.
What is the basilar membrane?
A strip of tissue inside the cochlea that contains the hair cells that transduce sound.
What is binocular disparity?
The fact that the image of the world falling on each of the two eyes is different.
What does bi-stable mean?
Property of a stimulus that has alternating stable perceptual interpretations.
What is bottom-up processing?
Perceptual processing that is applied generally to all stimuli and does not depend on specific knowledge of the stimulus or its category.
What are chemoreceptors?
Sensory receptors with nerve endings specialized to respond to chemicals in the environment. (blood stream)
What is classification?
A form of recognition that consists of determining whether a given image corresponds to a class or category.
What is the cochlea?
A coiled, bony structure in the inner ear that is filled with fluid and contains the basilar membrane.
What is a cone?
A type of photoreceptor, largely contained in the central fovea of the retina, that supports high spatial resolution and color vision under higher lighting conditions.
What is constructive perception?
A model of perception in which the sensory information is used to generate a mental model of the environment that is assumed to have caused the sensory stimulus.
What is convergence (neural)?
When multiple neurons send signals to a single neuron.
What is the cornea?
A transparent rubbery layer of tissue at the front of the eyeball that bends light to focus it on the retina.
What is the cortical homunculus?
A spatially organized map of the human body, contained within the somatosensory cortex, that processes touch information.
What is direct perception?
A theoretical approach to perception that holds that the sensory stimuli be used to guide behavior in an action/perception loop.
What is the ear canal?
A narrow tube following from the pinna that amplifies certain sound frequencies and transmits them to the eardrum.
What is the eardrum?
A thin piece of tissue separating the ear canal from the inner ear that amplifies certain frequencies and passes them to a series of tiny bones called the ossicles.
What is equilibrioception?
The perception of bodily balance.
What is exteroception?
The sensing and processing of information from the external environment by the five basic senses: vision, audition, touch, taste, and smell.
What is a feature map?
A representation in a CNN (convolutional neural network) of how much of a given feature is present across different locations in an image.
What is figure-ground assignment?
The determination of which side of a boundary contains the shape versus the background.
What is focus in perception?
A property of an image in which specific locations in the environment correspond to specific locations on the imaging device.
What is the fovea?
A depression in the center of the retina that is densely packed with cone photoreceptors and is responsible for seeing detailed properties.
What is frequency (wavelength)?
A measure of the lengths of a wave defined as the distance between the crests of sequential waves.
What is the fusiform face area (FFA)?
A region in the inferior temporal cortex that shows greatest activity when a subject is performing face-specific tasks.
What is general recognition?
The ability for a computer to classify a broad class of different objects.
What is gustation?
The sense of taste.
What are hair cells?
Mechanoreceptors in the basilar membrane that convert cochlea fluid’s vibrations into a neural signal that is sent to the brain.
What is identification?
Form of recognition determining whether a given image corresponds to a specific object or individual.
What is interoception?
The sensing and processing of information from inside the body.
What is the iris?
A ring of colored muscle around the pupil that contracts or relaxes in order to determine the size of the pupil.
What is the lateral occipital cortex (LOC)?
Region in the occipital cortex most active when a subject is performing object-recognition tasks.
What is the lateral sulcus?
A deep fissure that divides both the frontal and parietal lobes from the temporal lobe.
What is lightness?
The perception of how light or dark a surface is.
What are mechanoreceptors?
Sensory receptors specialized to respond to mechanical force.
What is motion parallax?
A cue to depth perception based on the fact that, when moving, objects that are closer to you change their position in the visual field more quickly than those that are further away.
What is nociception?
The perception of pain due to internal bodily damage.
What is olfaction?
The sense of smell.
What is the olfactory bulb?
A specialized brain structure at the bottom of the forebrain that receives the information from the olfactory epithelium.
What is the olfactory epithelium?
A strip of tissue in the nasal cavity that contains the chemical sensory receptors that support the sense of smell.
What is the optic nerve?
A bundle of axons that transmit visual information from the retina to the brain.
What are ossicles?
A set of three tiny bones in the inner ear that amplifies certain frequencies and relays them to the cochlea.
What is perception?
The processing and interpretation of sensory information into a form that can meaningfully guide behavioral decisions.
What is the phonemic restoration effect?
A perceptual phenomenon in which missing sounds are ‘filled in’ by the brain based on knowledge of language.
What are photoreceptors?
Sensory receptors specialized to respond to light.
What is the pinna?
The visible portion of ear made up of folded cartilage; it serves to gather and transmit sound into the ear canal.
What is the primary auditory cortex (A1)?
A region in the temporal lobe of the cortex that is the first to receive auditory information in the cortex.
What is the primary gustatory cortex?
The first region of the cortex to receive information from the gustatory sensory system.
What is the primary visual cortex (V1)?
The first region of the cortex to receive visual input.
What is proprioception?
The perception of the location of the limbs in space.
What is prosopagnosia?
A visual deficit that leads to an inability or difficulty in recognizing faces.
What is the pupil?
A small hole at the center of the iris that controls how much light is allowed to pass into the eye.
What is the retina?
A structure in the back of the eye consisting of multiple layers of neurons, including photoreceptors in the final layer which transduce light.
What are rods?
A type of photoreceptor in the retina, outside of central vision, that responds to lower light but with reduced spatial acuity and no color differentiation.
What is a scene schema?
A learned representation of which objects tend to appear in specific kinds of scenes.
What is semantic agnosia?
A visual deficit leading to the inability to recognize objects.
What is sensation?
The conversion of physical properties of the world or body into a neural code by the peripheral nervous system.
What is the somatosensory cortex?
A region of the brain, located in the parietal lobe, that receives multiple sources of sensory information from across the body, including sensation of touch.
What are sound waves?
Oscillating movement in the air caused by vibrations of objects in the environment.
What is stereopsis?
The use of binocular disparity (the fact that image falling in the two eyes is different) in perceiving depth.
What are taste buds?
Structures on the surface of the tongue that contain the sensory receptors for taste.
What is a template in recognition?
A simple model of recognition that depends on directly matching an incoming image to an object or category in order to determine whether they reach some threshold of similarity.
What is the thalamus?
A subcortical region of the brain that serves as a way-station between sensory inputs and the cortex.
What are thermoceptors?
Sensory receptors specialized to respond to heat.
What is a tonotopic map?
A spatial arrangement of neural structures (such as hair cells) in which locations are organized based on the frequency of sound they encode.
What is top-down processing?
Perceptual processing that leverages prior stimulus or category specific knowledge to interpret new information.
What is visual grouping?
The perception of discrete visual elements as forming a larger pattern or whole.
