Chapter 3 - Sensation And Perception Flashcards
The process that occurs when special receptors in the sense organs are activated, allowing various forms of outside stimuli to become neural signals in the brain.
Sensation
Disorder in which the signals from the various sensory organs are processed in the wrong cortical areas, resulting in the sense information being interpreted as more than one sensation.
Synesthesia
The process of converting outside stimuli, such as light, into neural activity.
Transduction
The smallest difference between two stimuli that is detectable 50 percent of the time.
Just noticeable difference - jnd (or the difference threshold)
The lowest level of stimulation that a person can consciously detect 50 percent of the time the stimulation is present.
Absolute threshold
Tendency of the brain to stop attending to constant, unchanging information.
Habituation
Tendency of sensory receptor cells to become less responsive to a stimulus that is unchanging.
Sensory adaptation
The change in the thickness of the lens as the eye focuses on objects that are far away or close.
Visual accommodation
Visual sensory receptors found at the back of the retina, responsible for non color sensitivity to low levels of light.
Rods
Visual sensory receptors found at the back of the retina, responsible for color vision and sharpness of vision.
Cones
Area in the retina where the axons of the three layers of retinal cells exit the eye to form the optic nerve, insensitive to light.
Blind spot
The recovery of the eye’s sensitivity to visual stimuli in darkness after exposure to bright lights.
Dark adaptation
The recovery of the eye’s sensitivity to visual stimuli in light after exposure to darkness.
Light adaptation
Theory of color vision that proposes three types of cones: red, blue, and green.
Trichromatic theory
Images that occur when a visual sensation persists for a brief time even after the original stimulus is removed.
Afterimages
