Perception Flashcards
What is perception
The set of processes by which we recognize, organize, and make sense of the sensations we receive from environmental stimuli
Is what we sense in our sensory organs they same as what we perceive
No
Problem solved by perception
Understand what is going on outside of the brain
Importance of perception
Necessary in order to know how to act in the world to achieve goals
Inverse problem of perception
Create a representation (perception) of what is out in the world (the distal stimulus) from what we sense (proximal stimulus)
Sources of information for perception
Genes
Past experience
Internal state
Environmental context
Proximal stimulus
What we learned on the timescale of evolution
Genes
Information learned on timescale of a human life
Past experience
Information learned on timescale of current episode
Internal state
Information learned now
Environmental context
Proximal stimulus
The stimulus itself -> pattern of light on eye
The energy or matter that impinges on the sensory receptors
Sensory system function
Do the conversion of proximal stimulus into neural signals
General sensory system steps
Distal stimulus
Proximal stimulus
Sensory receptors
Neural pathways
Hierarchy of cortical areas
Percept
Distal stimulus
Thing out in the world
Sensory receptos function
Specialized cells to transduce (convert) external phenomena (light, sound, pressure, etc…) into neural signals
Neural pathway
APs travel from sensory receptors via thalamic nuclei to cerebral cortex
Function of Hierarchy of cortical areas
Attempt to construct useful representation of distal stimulus
Percept definition
Mental representation of the distal stimulus after all the neural processing
Function of cornea
focuses light
Function of lens in eye
muscles cause it to change shape and focus light onto the retina
Retina
back surface of eye
Fovea
most sensitive part of retina where the light we are looking directly at lands
contains mostly cones
Optic disk
part of retina that has no photoreceptors → blind spot
Where cell axons exit the eye to form the optic nerve
Optic nerve
ganglion cell axons leaving the eye