Chapter 6 Flashcards
Sensation
The detection, by sense organs, of physical energy emitted or reflected by physical objects.
Perception
The process by which the brain organizes and interprets sensory information.
Sense receptors
Specialized cells that convert physical energy in the environmental or the body to electrical energy that can be transmitted as nerve impulses to the brain.
Doctrine of specific nerve energies
The principle that different sensory modalities exist because signals received by the sense organs stimulate different nerve pathways leading to different areas of the brain.
Synesthesia
A condition in which stimulation of one sense also envokes another.
Absolute threshold
The smaller quantity of physical energy that can be reliably detected by an observer.
Difference threshold
The smallest difference in stimulation that can be reliably detected by an observer when two stimuli are compared.
Signal-detection theory
A psychophysical theory that divides the detection of a sensory signal into a sensory process and a decision process.
Sensory adaptation
The reduction or disappearance of sensory responsiveness when stimulation is unchanging or repetitious.
Sensory deprivation
The absence of normal levels of sensory stimulation.
Selective attention
The focusing of attention on selected aspects of the environment and the blocking out of others.
Inattentional blindness
Failure to consciously perceive something you are looking at because you are not attending to it.
Hue
The dimension of visual experience specified by color names and related to the amount (intensity) of light emitted from or reflected by an object.
Saturation
Vividness or purity of color; the dimension of visual experience related to the complexity of light waves.
Retina
Neural tissue lining the back of the eyeball’s interior, which contains the receptors for vision.
Rods
Visual receptors that respond to dim light.
Cones
Visual receptors involved in color vision.
Dark adaption
A process by which visual receptors become maximally sensitive to dim light.
Ganglion cells
Neurons in the retina of the eye, which gather information from receptor cells; their axons make up the optic nerve.
Feature detectors
Cells in the visual cortex that are sensitive to specific features of the environment.
Trichromatic theory
A theory of color perception that proposes three mechanisms in the visual system, each sensitive to a certain range of wavelengths; their interaction is assumed to produce all the different experiences of hue.
Opponent-process theory
A theory of color perception that assumes that the visual system treats pairs of colors as opposing or antagonistic.
Perceptual set
A habitual way of perceiving, based on expectations.
Kinesthesis
The sense of body position and movement of body parts.
Equilibrium
The sense of balance.
Semicircular canals
Sense organs in the inner ear that contribute to equilibrium by responding to rotation of the head.
Phantom pain
The experience of pain in a missing limb or other body part.
Gate-control theory
The theory that the experience of pain depends in part on whether pain impulses get past a neurological “gate” in the spinal cord and thus reach the brain.
Gestalt principles
Principles that describe the brain’s organization of sensory information into meaningful units and patterns.
Binocular Cues
Visual cues to depth or distance requiring two eyes.
Convergence
The turning inward of the eyes, which occurs when they focus on a nearby object.
Retinal disparity
The slight difference in lateral separation between two objects as seen by the left eye and the right eye.
Monocular Cues
Visual cues to depth or distance, which can be used by one eye alone.
Perceptual constancy
The accurate perception of objects as stable or unchanged despite changes in the sensory patterns they produce.
Anatomical code
described by Johannes Muller in his doctrine of specific nerve energies; different sensory modalities exist because signals received by the sense organs stimulate differentnerve pathwaysleading to different areas of the brain.
Functional codes
additional code that helps us discern between differences in firing codes in the brain
Brightness
Lightness or luminance
gestalt psychologists
psychologists who first studied how people organize the world visually into meaningful units and patterns
