ch.4: sensing and perceiving mind

Question 1

Immanuel kant (1720)

Answer 1

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

Question 2

noumenal world

Answer 2

Kant’s concept of the external world as made up of things-in-themselves which exist in a pure state, independent of human experience

Question 3

phenomenal world

Answer 3

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

Question 4

intuitions

Answer 4

Kant’s term for the human mind’s automatic ordering of all phenomenal experiences in terms of space and time

Question 5

categories

Answer 5

Kant’s term for the characteristics automatically imposed by the mind on phenomenal experience, defining their quality, quantity, relationships, and mode

Question 6

Charles bell

Answer 6

scottish scientist who first developed and published on the law of specific nerve endings

Question 7

the law of specific nerve endings (Bell)

Answer 7

the idea that each sensory nerve in the body conveys one, and only one, kind of sensation

Question 8

vitalism

Answer 8

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

Question 9

physiological mechanism

Answer 9

a doctrine suggesting that all natural processes are potentially understandable in terms of physical and chemical principles

Question 10

law of conservation of energy

Answer 10

the idea that energy can be transformed from one state to another but can never be created or destroyed by any physical process

Question 11

reaction time

Answer 11

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

Question 12

sensations

Answer 12

the raw elements of conscious experience which require no learning or prior experience

Question 13

perceptions

Answer 13

the meaningful interpretations given to sensations

Question 14

James clerk Maxwell

Answer 14

Scottish scientist who studied color vision and who provided the most complete analysis of color mixing in 1855

primary colors vs complementary colors

Question 15

perceptual adaptation

Answer 15

the idea that when a person’s visual field is altered, the brain adapts to new perceptions automatically and unconsciously

Question 16

conscious inference

Answer 16

an unconscious adoption of certain logicals rules

Question 17

ewald hering

Answer 17

a contemporary of helmholtz

theorized about color afterimages and prompted the opponent theory of color vision

Question 18

color afterimages

Answer 18

phenomenon in which an afterimage in the complementary color remains after staring at a colored object

Question 19

Eleanor jack Gibson

Answer 19

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

Question 20

visual cliff

Answer 20

platform with a transparent glass floor set above a cliff so that part of the platform has no visible surface directly below

Question 21

Gustav fechner

Answer 21

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

Question 22

fechner’s law

Answer 22

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

Question 23

just noticeable difference

Answer 23

the minimum amount of difference between two stimulus intensities necessary for an observer to tell them apart

Weber came up with this

Question 24

absolute threshold

Answer 24

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

Question 25

gestalt psychology

Answer 25

focuses on the ways the mind organizes experiences and perceptions into organized wholes that are more than the sums of their separate parts

Question 26

christian ehrenfels (1860s)

Answer 26

austrian psychologist who prefigured Gestalt psychology with his writings about our inability to introspectively break down whole objects or ideas into separate sensory elements

Question 27

max wertheimer (1880s)

Answer 27

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