Chapter 6 Sensation and Perception Flashcards
What is the rough distinction between sensation and perception?
Sensation is the bottom-up process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimuli.
Perception is the top-down process by which your brain creates meaning by organizing and interpreting what your senses detect.
What is the three steps to transduction?
Receiving sensory stimulation, transforming stimuli into neural impulses, then delivering the neural information to the brain.
What is transduction?
Transduction is the process of converting one form of energy into another that our brain can use.
What are absolute thresholds?
Absolute thresholds is the minimum stimulation needed to detect a stimulus 50% of the time.
Signal detection theory
predicts how and when we will detect a faint stimulus amid background noise.
Explain subliminal stimulation
Input below the absolute threshold for conscious awareness. A stimuli that are too weak and below the 50% mark
Difference threshold
Also known as “just noticeable difference” - it’s the minimal difference a person can detect between any two stimuli half of the time.
Weber’s Law
For an average person to perceive a difference, two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage (not constant amount)
Why is it that after wearing shoes for a while, you cease to notice them (until questions like this draw your attention back at them)?
Sensory adaptation - the shoes provide constant stimulation, sensory adaptation only focuses on changing stimuli.
Does perceptual set involve bottom-up processing or top-down processing? Why?
Perceptual set involves top-down processing because it draws in your experiences, assumptions, and expectations when reacting to stimuli.
Sensation is to ________ as perceptions is to _________.
A) absolute threshold; difference threshold
B) bottom-up processing; top-down processing
C) interpretation; detection
D) grouping; priming
B - bottom-up processing; top-down processing
The process by which we organize and interpret sensory information is called _________.
Perception which is top-down processing
Subliminal stimuli are
A) too weak to be processed
B) a constant minimum percentage
C) strong enough to affect our behavior at least 75% of the time
D) below our absolute threshold for conscious awareness
D - below our absolute threshold for conscious awareness
Another term for difference threshold is ______ ______ ______.
Just noticeable difference
Weber's law states that for a difference to be perceived, two stimuli must differ by A) a fixed constant energy amount B) a constant minimum percentage C) a constantly changing amount D) more than 7%
B- a constant minimum percentage
Sensory adaptation helps us focus on
Important changes in the environment
Our perceptual set influences what we perceive. This mental tendency reflects our
A) experiences, assumptions and expectations
B) sensory adaptation
C) priming ability
D) difference thresholds
A - experiences, assumptions, and expectations.
Explain the retina, and what is it function.
The retina is the light-sensitive inner surface of the eye, containing receptor cells called cones and rods that convert this light into neural impulses that organize and interpret these messages. The retina receives an upside-down image.
Cones
Cones take in color light and fine detail and are concentrated near the fovea- the retina’s focal point.
Rods
Rods take in black and white vision, for dim lighting and peripheral vision; several rods to bipolar rods.
Optic nerve
signals from the bipolar cells activate the ganglion cells (whose axons converge to form the optic nerve)
Young- Helmholtz theory
The retina’s red, green and blue cones respond in varying degrees to different color stimuli.
Opponent process theory
Cones’ responses are then processed by retinal ganglion cells and the thalamus. Process color = pairs (red to green, yellow to blue)
Gestalt
People tend to organize information into an organized whole (Gestalt is a German word meaning whole).
Figure- ground
organization of the visual field into objects that stand out from their surroundings.
Grouping
Perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into meaningful groups
Binocular cues
Two eyes improve perception depth
Retinal disparity
binocular cue for perceiving depth
Monocular cues
A depth cue, such as interposition or linear perspective, is available to either eye alone.
The characteristic of light that determines the color we experience, such as blue or green, is ________.
Wave length
The amplitude of a light wavelength determines our perception of _____.
Brightness
The blind spot in your retina is located where?
The optic nerve leaves the eye.
Cones are the eyes receptor cells that are especially sensitive to _____ light and are responsible for our ______ vision.
bright light, and color vision
Two theories together account for color vision. The young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory shows that the eye contains ____, and the Hering’s theory accounts for the nervous systems having _____.
A) opposing retinal processes; three pairs of color receptors
B) opponents-processing cells; three types of color receptors
C) three pairs of color receptors; opposing retinal processes
D) three types of color receptors; opponent-process cells
D- three types of color receptors; opponent-process cells.
The cells in the visual cortex that respond to certain line, edges, and angles are called _____ ______.
feature detectors
The brains ability to process many aspects of an object or a problem simultaneously is called _____ _____.
parallel processing
Our tendency to fill in the gaps and to perceive a pattern as continuous are two different examples of the organizing principle called \_\_\_\_\_\_. A) interposition B) depth perception C) shape constancy D) grouping
D - grouping
In listening to a concert, you attend to the solo instrument and perceive the orchestra as accompaniment. This illustrates the organizing principle of _______.
Figure-ground
The visual cliff experiments suggest that
A) infants have not yet developed depth perception
B) crawling infants and very young animals perceive depth.
C) we have no way of knowing whether infants can perceive depth
D) unlike any other species, humans are able to perceive depth in infancy.
B- crawling infants and very young animals perceive depth
Depth perception underlines our ability to
A) group similar items in a gestalt
B) perceive objects as having a constant shape or form
C) judge distances
D) fill in the gaps of a figure
C - judge distances
Two examples of ____ depth cues are interposition and linear perspective.
monocular depth cues
Perceiving a tomato as a consistently red, despite of lighting shifts, is an example of _____
Perceptual consistency
After surgery to restore vision, adults who had been blind from birth had difficulty
A) recognizing objects by touch
B) recognizing objects by sight
C) distinguishing figure from sound
D) distinguishing between bright and dim light
B - recognizing objects by sight
In experiments, people who have worn glasses that turned their visual fields upside down. After a period of adjustments, they learned to function quite well. This ability is called ________.
perceptual adaptation
