Midterm 1: Chapter 1 Flashcards
Identified with complex processes that involve higher-order mechanisms such as interpretation and memory that involve activity in the brain.
Perception
Process begins with a stimulus in the environment and ends with the conscious experiences.
Perceptual process
What is the steps of the perceptual process?
- stimulus in the environment
- stimulus hits the receptors
- receptor processes
- neural processing
- perception!
- Recognition
- Action
a stimulus out there in the environment; “distant”
Distal Stimulus
a stimulus “in proximity” to the receptors
Proximal stimulus
States that stimuli and responses created by stimuli are transformed, or changed, between the distal stimulus and perception.
Principle of transformation
States that everything a person perceives is based not on direct contact with stimuli but on representations of stimuli that are formed on the receptors and the resulting activity in the person’s nervous system.
Principle of representation
Cells specialized to respond to environmental energy
Sensory Receptors
_________ receptors respond to light
Visual
_________ receptors respond to pressure changes in the air.
Auditory
_________ receptors respond to pressure transmitted through the skin
Touch
_________ and __________ receptors respond to chemicals entering the nose and mouth.
Smell and taste
Contains the machinery for creating perceptions, language, memory, emotions, and thinking
Cerebral cortex
Area for hearing
Temporal lobe
Area for vision
Occipital lobe
Area for touch, temperature, and pain
parietal lobe
Area that receives signals from all of the senses, and it plays an important role in perceptions that involve the coordination of information received through two or more senses.
Frontal lobe
Inability to recognize objects
Visual form agnosia
How does the perceptual process important for survival?
It helps the animals control navigation, catch prey, avoid obstacles, and detect predators.
Any info that the perceiver brings to a situation, such as prior experience or expectations.
Knowledge
Processing that is based on the stimuli reaching the receptors
Bottom-up processing
Processing that is based on Knowledge
Top-down processing
Effect where people see vertical or horizontal lines better than lines oriented obliquely
Oblique Effect
Measures the relationships between the physical (the stimulus) and the psychological (the behavioral response)
Psychophysics
Relates stimuli to behavioral responses, such as perception, recognition.
Stimulus-behavior relationship
The relationship between stimuli and physiological responses, like neurons firing
Stimulus-Physiological Relationship
Smallest stimulus level that can just be detected
Absolute threshold
measure the limits of sensory systems
Threshold
the stimuli start low enough to be undetectable and gradually increase over time until they can be detected
Method of limits
subjects usually need to be randomly presented with constantly different physical stimuli at different intensities each time the stimuli are presented
Method of constant stimuli
the subject is asked to control the level of the stimulus and to alter it until it is just barely detectable against the background noise, or is the same as the level of another stimulus.
Method of Adjustments
The smallest difference between two stimuli that enables us to tell the difference between them.
Difference threshold
The time between presentation of stimulus and the person’s reaction to it.
Reaction time
Define the perceptual phenomena we want to explain
Phenomenon logical report
How is the perception of light determined?
by determining perceived brightness using a method such as magnitude estimation
a band of energy randing from gamma rays at the short-wave end of the spectrum AM radio at the long wave end.
Electromagnetic Spectrum
______ is the color of long wavelengths
red
________ is the color of short wavelengths
blue
Physical size of an object in the world
Distal size
Size of the object’s projection onto the retina
Proximal size
Why do we have 2 eyes?
- Binocular summation: pool twice as much light
- increase the field of view
- Better peripheral vision
- Other eyes make up for a damaged one
- redundancy in case of danger
- larger visual field
- better depth info
Disadvantages to 2 eyes?
- problem in one eye causes problems to the others (eyes need to line up)
- can fail at coordination
- Need more processing power
Why is it good that we can move our eyes in our head?
- less energy and faster relative to moving the head.
- better precision since it’s easier to use
- wider field of view
- incase of danger, being able to hide easier
- Fixation/vergence
- Facilitates eye care
- Rolling your eyes, using your eyes for expression/communication.
- compensate for body/head motion
Pupil control can modulate the amount of light entering the eye by a factor of _______.
16
What is the issue with pinhole optics?
You need a small aperture (opening) to reduce blur.
A term used to describe the state of having perfect vision, or 20/20 sight, in which the eye focuses light on the retina to produce a clear image
Emmetropic
What factors affect the detection threshold?
- wavelength
- intensity of light
- Intertrial interval
- background/adaption
- duration
- position on retina
- adaption time
- size of spot
- subject with good vision
How many quanta per rod?
1 quanta, but needs 10 to work
