lectures 1 Flashcards
goal of sensation and perception
to find out about the external world
what processes is sensation and perception the starting point of?
cognition
mental health
social
developmental/ educational
what are the 10 senses?
vision hearing touch smell taste temperature pain balance acceleration body position
physical association of taste
chemicals
physical association of vision
light
physical association of hearing
sound waves
physical association of touch
pressure
physical association of smell
chemicals
receptor cells
specialised neurons that respond to a particular physical property of environmental stimuli `
sensory receptors are sensitive to…
physical properties in the environment
function of vision
object identification/ recognition
Navigation
Motion perception
function of audition
Object identification/ recognition
object localisation
function of touch
Object identification/ recognition
pain: detection of tissue damage
function of smell and taste
chemical detection/ identification
nutrition and poison avoidance
distal stimulus
physical object in the environment
proximal stimulus
information about the distal stimulus received by the sensory receptor cells
a representation of the distal stimulus
proximal stimulus
information about the distal stimulus received by the sensory receptor cells
a representation of the distal stimulus
transduction
the transformation of environmental physical energy into electrical energy in the nervous system
neural processing
electrical signals transmitted from one neuron to the next
signal changed as neurons interact
perception
conscious sensory experinece
recognition
placing an object in a category
visual form agnosia
inability to recognise objects
what does visual form agnosia highlight?
distinction between recognition and perception
action
movement
bottom up processing
processing based on incoming sensory information
top down processing
processing based on prior knowledge, experience and assumptions
why is top down processing important?
helps simplify the perceptual process
is perception top down or bottom up?
both
types of imaging
fMRI
MEG
EEG
PET
physiological approaches to studying perception
studying anatomy recording brain activity -single cell recording -imaging Micro stimulation Lesioning and TMS
psychophysical approaches to studying perception
psychophysics lab
psychophysical approaches to studying perception
psychophysics lab
what does psychophysics do?
measures the relationship between stimulus and perception
uses carefully controlled experiments to test perceptual perfomance
absolute detection
what is the smallest stimulus we can perceive?
absolute intensity
taken as intensity that gives 75% correct performance
galanter 1692
translated human absolute thresholds
problem measuring absolute intensity
people have different criteria for saying yes I see it
participants in psychophysics experiment
small number of participants
many repetitions
name of function that graphs absolute detection
psychometric
difference (discrimination)
what is the smallest difference we can perceive
question type for discrimination
forced choice
things to consider with value from difference discrimination
not a constant value/ quantity
it is related to the baseline level
weber’s law
difference as a proportion of baseline quantity is constant (difference/ discrimination values)
