Midterm 2. Flashcards
DOES NOT INCLUDE CHAPTER 5.
John Locke argued that all knowledge comes via _________________________ reported passively by our sense and that, at birth, the human mind is a blank state, or ______________. ____________ then leaves its mark.
Accumulated experience; tabula rasa; experience.
For terminology’s sake, define the words “distil” and “proximal”, as it pertains to stimuli.
Distil = "at some distance from" (the observer). Proximal = "in terms of immediate representation to" (the organ).
Empiricists say that if a person has different distil stimuli but the same proximal stimuli because of distance cues like visual perspective, they can answer it by simply learning which cue is correct. What is the key word for attempts to assess depth and accumulate memory in this phenomenon?
Repeated association.
Kant noted that the mind is able to organize or file information for sensory in categories like space, time, or causality. Define this philosophical position.
Nativism explains that these categories must be native to the structure of the mind itself.
What do psychophysics try to accomplish?
They try to discover what laws govern the relationship between the characteristics of physical stimuli and the attributes of the sensory experience they produce.
What does psychophysiology concern itself with?
It concerns itself with the neural consequences of a given stimulus input… how it affects receptors, the pathways to the brain, and neural structures higher up in the brain.
Weber discovered that the ____ of the difference threshold is a ________ ratio of the __________ of the stimulus used as the anchor, reference, or standard. This _________ relationship is called _______’s ___.
Size; constant; magnitude; constant; Weber’s; Law.
Explain Fechner’s Law (formula).
S = k log I
S - psychological (subjective) magnitude.
I = Intensity of physical stimulus.
k = constant that depends on the value of the Weber Fraction.
The logarithmic aspect of _________’s Law reinforces that our _________ system has to have a mechanism to ___________ a huge range of stimulus sensitivities into some manageable _____.
Fechner’s; nervous; compress; scope.
The relationship between a subject’s _________ and various characteristics of the _____________________ is influenced by the subject’s ____________ and ___________ regarding these ________.
Responses; physical stimulus; expectations and wishes; stimuli.
What is signal-reduction theory? (Read, don’t answer.)
The theory that the act of perceiving or not perceiving a stimulus is actually a judgment about whether a momentary sensory experience is due to background noise alone or to a background noise plus a signal: also includes a procedure for measuring memory sensitivity.
Two factors working in signal detection… briefly talk about them.
Bonus: What type of experiements separate these two factors?
1) Sensitivity: how well the subject can see or hear the stimulus.
2) Response bias: how willing the subject is to say “yes, I heard,” or “no, I didn’t,” when he is not certain.
Bonus: Detection experiments… in a detection experiment, a fairly weak stimulus is taken in half the trials, and in the other half, no stimulus at all is taken. Two errors are found: “miss” errors (beta error) happen when a person misses a stimulus that is present; “false alarm” errors (alpha error) happens when a false reporting occurs.
Explain the basics of the payoff matrix.
The payoff matrix speaks of the ratio of amount of reward for success to amount of penalty for failure. Essentially, if the evidence of a correct decision or of a decision in general is unclear, the “payoff” of making a certain decision definitely can determine what decision is made.
Why does a person have so much trouble distinguishing the presence of a stimulus, or its absence?
Very simply, the struggle is present because there is no such thing as zero stimulus.
It is thought that all _________________________ are based on underlying ___________________ in the sensory system…. what is this called?
Psychological judgments; neural activity.
Sensory process.
Sensory processes can vary in ___________ and can occur either as (1) the result of an _______, ________________ or as (2) the result of _____________________ from within the person’s own _______ and ________________.
Magnitude; actual, external stimulus; background noise; body and nervous system.
Magnitude distributions of ______ stimulus and of the ______+______ can overlap in varying degree. The observer, to the extent of overlap, will have trouble discriminating the _______ from the _____: mistakes are made dependent on _________ but also on ____________ to take ________ risks in “calling the shots” when things remaind unclear. This is essentially response bias.
The outcomes of these __________ fall into 4 possible categories: ____, ____________, ______________, and _________. Frequency of each is influenced by sensitivity and response bias affected by __________ and _____________ governed by payoff matrices.
Noise; signal + noise; signal; noise; sensitivity; willingness; decision.
Decisions; hits, false alarms, correct negatives, and misses; expectancies and motivations.
Say Psychophysics concerns itself with ‘input-to-output’ relationships… in relation, Psychophysiology must concern itself with what, with what type of exact meaning?
Psychophysiology concerns itself with the “through-put,” essentially, the intervening neural steps that it takes to get between input and output.
Sensory codes, remember, drive sensory experiences in psychophysiology. Given this, explain the code for psychological intensity, as changes in _______ & _______ as an example.
Loudness; brightness.
It takes two forms… either as firing frequency, or the sheer number of neurons that are triggered by the stimulus.
What exactly codes for sensory quality?
Johannes Muller investigated, and formatted the doctrine of ________________________, where _______ = ________. In this law, the differences in experienced ______ are caused by the different nervous structures which these stimulus _______, likely in centers higher up in the brain.
Specific nerve energies; energies = qualities; quality; excite.
Sensory adaptation is the process by which the sensitivity to a stimulus _________ if the stimulus is presented an extended _______of_____ with ___________ in it.
Declines; period of time; no change.
The sensation of ______________ and the sensation of _____ are related, respectively, to the amplitude of ______________ enegy and its ____________ (the ______ it is, the more towards the blue end of the color spectrum in terms of the sensation induced and the _______ the more toward the red end) in ways closely resembling _________ and ___________ of an acoustical wave, representing loudness and pitch.
Light intensity; color; electromagnetic; wavelength; shorter; longer; amplitude; wavelength.
Rod photoreceptors with their ___________________ are much more sensitive to ___ levels of light and over a broader _____of______________ than are the cone photo receptors. However, unlike cones they do not ______for______. This makes them useful for what type of vision… and in what color does this come out to?
Rhodospin pigments; low; range of wave frequencies; code for color.
Night vision, shades of gray.
Cones, with their ______ location and ____-to-____ relation with underlying ________ cells make for better _____ while rods and their ____-to-____ relationships with _________ are better for detecting _________.
Foveal; one-to-one; ganglion; many-to-one; ganglions; movement.
There are three types of cones, in terms of photopigments, differing on sensitivities to wavelengths: what are these wavelengths?
440 nm; 530 nm; 570 nm.
Define, in detail, the retina.
Retina: Where images are focused in the eye; the layer of tissue at the back of teh interior of the eye that contains the photoreceptors (rods and cones), bipolar cells, and ganglion cells whose axons make up the optic nerve.
Explain the type of image that is projected on the retina, and when will size increase or decrease.
The retinal image is the image that is projected on the retina (which is a proximal stimulus) of an object in the real world (distal stimulus): the size increases with the size of the object and decreases with the object’s distance from the eye.
Where are photoreceptors located?
Back of the retina.
Where does light enter the eye? Also, talk about this particular part of the eye and how it governs the amount of light entering the eye.
The iris is where light enters the eye.
It either contracts or dilates under reflex control in order to govern the amount of light entering the eye.
Define the cornea and its role in focusing on images.
The cornea is the eye’s transparent outer covering, fixed in shape. It begins the process of refracting the light rays so that they will end up properly focused in the retina.
Eye diseases affecting the cornea will impair the eye’s ability to focus on images.
Define, locate, and explain the role of the lens.
Location: behind the cornea.
It’s the portion of the eye that bends light rays to focus the image on the retina: ligaments can adjust the shape of the lens, which can bend the light rays in different angles to tune the focusing process, almost like a camera.
What is the fovea?
It is the small, roughtly circular region at the center of the retina: if the viewer is directly looking at the source of the image, the image will fall on the fovea. Acuity is the greatest here compared to any other part of the retina when cones are bundled together.
Which cells excite ganglion cells? Also, what are ganglion cells, and what are their role?
Bipolar cells excite ganglion cells.
Ganglion cells’ axons converge into a bundle of fibers that leave the eye as the optic nerve.
What can damage to the optic nerve lead to?
Blindness: visual signals would be unable to be sent to the brain.
