ch.4: sensing and perceiving mind Flashcards
Immanuel kant (1720)
German philosopher
critical philosophy that emphasized the role of an active mind in creating the phenomenal world + the foundation for the establishment of experimental psychology
noumenal world
Kant’s concept of the external world as made up of things-in-themselves which exist in a pure state, independent of human experience
phenomenal world
Kant’s concept of the world as subjectively experienced, after being processed and transformed via the intuitions and categories of the mind
allows us to refer back to familiar categories
intuitions
Kant’s term for the human mind’s automatic ordering of all phenomenal experiences in terms of space and time
categories
Kant’s term for the characteristics automatically imposed by the mind on phenomenal experience, defining their quality, quantity, relationships, and mode
Charles bell
scottish scientist who first developed and published on the law of specific nerve endings
the law of specific nerve endings (Bell)
the idea that each sensory nerve in the body conveys one, and only one, kind of sensation
vitalism
school of thought suggesting all living organisms are imbued with a life force that gives them their vitality and that is not analyzable by scientific methods
physiological mechanism
a doctrine suggesting that all natural processes are potentially understandable in terms of physical and chemical principles
law of conservation of energy
the idea that energy can be transformed from one state to another but can never be created or destroyed by any physical process
reaction time
the measurable time between the introduction of stimuli and the completion of various kinds of responses to them; came to the prominence following Helmholtz’s demonstration of the finite speed of the nervous impulse
sensations
the raw elements of conscious experience which require no learning or prior experience
perceptions
the meaningful interpretations given to sensations
James clerk Maxwell
Scottish scientist who studied color vision and who provided the most complete analysis of color mixing in 1855
primary colors vs complementary colors
perceptual adaptation
the idea that when a person’s visual field is altered, the brain adapts to new perceptions automatically and unconsciously
conscious inference
an unconscious adoption of certain logicals rules
ewald hering
a contemporary of helmholtz
theorized about color afterimages and prompted the opponent theory of color vision
color afterimages
phenomenon in which an afterimage in the complementary color remains after staring at a colored object
Eleanor jack Gibson
psychologist at Cornell
devised the visual cliff studies, which resulted in the idea that depth perception occurs innately or extremely early in development, without prior learning
visual cliff
platform with a transparent glass floor set above a cliff so that part of the platform has no visible surface directly below
Gustav fechner
German scientist
worked on the measurement of the relationship between subjective and physical stimulus intensities showed the possibility of a mathematically based experimental psychology in a field now known as psychophysics
wrote elements of psychophysics
fechner’s law
the assertion that the observed relationship between physical and subjective stimulus intensities for many different sense can be expressed by the single general mathematical formula: S = kluge
just noticeable difference
the minimum amount of difference between two stimulus intensities necessary for an observer to tell them apart
Weber came up with this
absolute threshold
fechner’s term for the smallest intensity of a stimulus that could be perceived which is classified as the zero point on a scale of psychological intensities
gestalt psychology
focuses on the ways the mind organizes experiences and perceptions into organized wholes that are more than the sums of their separate parts
christian ehrenfels (1860s)
austrian psychologist who prefigured Gestalt psychology with his writings about our inability to introspectively break down whole objects or ideas into separate sensory elements
max wertheimer (1880s)
former student of Ehrenfels whose studies on optical illusions, apparent movement, and the phi phenomenon helped found that field of gestalt psychology
also promoted a theory of productive thinking and became a mentor to Abraham Maslow
