Chapters 1-5 vocab Flashcards
Sensation
immediate, fundamental, direct experience
Perception
organization and interpretation of sensory information
Neural processing
signals travel in a network (maze) of neurons
Frontal lobe
lobe of the brain that recognizes high order processing
Temporal lobe
lobe of the brain that distinguishes sounds
Parietal lobe
lobe of the brain that deals with skin senses
Occipital lobe
lobe of the brain that deals with vision
Thalamus
nugget inside your brain that processes every sense, except for smell, and deciding whether or not to send to a lobe for interpretation
Light
stimulus for visual perception
Retina
back of the eye where receptors reside (2D)
Fovea
central point of focus, cluster of cones in the retina
Summation
The ganglion cell keeps track all of the input of all
of the rods and decides to send a signal based in that input
Presbyopia
impaired vision as a result of aging
Transduction
light energy into electrical energy
Opsin
visual pigment molecules in the outer segment of a receptor; a large protein
Retinal
visual pigment molecules in the outer segment of a receptor; a light sensitive molecule
Isomerization
retinal changes the molecule’s shape
Synapse
gap between axon of one neuron and dendrite of the next
Receptors
specialized neurons that respond to specific kinds of energy
Resting potential
the negative charge of the neuron relative to its surroundings
Action potential
a rapid sequence of changes in the voltage across a membrane.
Excitatory transmitters
cause depolarization
neuron becomes more positive, increases the likelihood of an action potential
Inhibitory transmitters
cause hyperpolarization, neuron becomes more negative, decreases the likelihood of an action potential
Mach bands
illusory light and dark bands near a light-dark border
lateral geniculate nucleus
a place in the thalamus that receives impulses from the optic nerve
Superior colliculus
recieves 10% of optic nerve fibers, involved in controlling eye movements
Selective rearing
raising an organism in an environment that only contains certain types of stimuli
Receptive fields
the area on the retina that influences the firing rate of the neurons
Retinotopic map
each place on the retina corresponds to a place on the LGN
Sensory code
representation of perceived objects through neural firing (Halle Berry)
“grandmother cell” hypothesis
a hypothetical neuron which encodes and responds to a highly specific but complex stimulus, such as one’s grandmother
Neural correlate of consciousness (NCC)
how physiological responses correlate with experience
Prosopagnosia
face blindness
Distributed coding
representation of an object or experience by the pattern of firing of a number of neurons
Feature Detectors
neurons that fire to specific features of a stimulus
Inverse projection problem
an image on the retina can be caused by an infinite number of
objects
FFA
fusiform face area in the temporal lobe specialized to recognizing faces
Viewpoint Invariance
humans can easily recognize objects when seen from different viewpoints.
Lightness
a property of a material surface and how much light it reflects
Orientation tuning curves
shows response of simple cortical cell for orientations of stimuli
Double dissociation
two functions are localized in different areas of the brain
Gestalt Approach
the whole differs from the sum of its parts
Visual transduction
occurs when the retinal absorbs one photon
