Chapter 4 Sensation and Perception

Question 1

Psychophysics

Answer 1

…Deals with sensation.

Question 2

Absolute threshold

Answer 2

Is the minimum stimulation needed for a person to notice something.

Question 3

Just Noticeable Difference (JND)

Answer 3

The smallest difference between two stimuli that a person can notice.

Question 4

Weber’s Law

Answer 4

Weber’s Law states that the more intense stimuli are, the harder it is to notice the JND.

Question 5

Sensory Adaptation

Answer 5

Allows us to attend to important stimuli and become insensitive to unimportant stimuli.

Question 6

Perception

Answer 6

Constructing meaning out of sensation.

Question 7

Gestalt

Answer 7

Gestalt psychologists were the first to study perception and how we piece meaning out of fragments. The mind fills in gaps in our sensations. The premise of Gestalt is that the whole is greater than the part.

Question 8

Perceptual Sets

Answer 8

Predispositions to perceive one thing and not another.

Question 9

Vision and eyes

Answer 9

Rods enable black&white vision; cones enable color and allow us to distinguish different wavelengths of light. Ganglion cells make up the optic nerve which carries information to the brain.

Question 10

Transduction.

Answer 10

Transforms one form of energy (like light) into another form (like energy).

Question 11

Binocular cues

Answer 11

Convergence is the extent your eyes must turn inward to focus on an object. Retinal disparity is the difference between the two images on your retinas.

Question 12

Monocular cues

Answer 12

Interposition. Texture gradients. Linear perspective; the more 2 lines converge, the greater their perceived distance. Motion parallax or relative motion is the perception that objects closer than the fixation point seem to move backwards.

Question 13

Shape constancy

Answer 13

Recognize an object when seeing it from a new angle.