Perception Flashcards
What is sensation?
The process by which our sensory organs receive stimulus energies from the environment and transduce them into the electrical energy of the nervous system.
What is transduction?
The transformation of sensory stimulus energy from the environment into neural impulses.
What is perception?
The neural processing of electrical signals to form an internal mental representation inside your brain of what’s going on outside.
What is adaption?
A phenomenon whereby an individual stops noticing a stimulus that remains constant over time, resulting in enhanced detection of stimulus changes.
What are aftereffects?
Opposing distortions that occur after adaption.
What is a wavelength?
The distance between any two consecutive crests or troughs of a wave.
What is frequency?
The number of cycles per second of a wave.
What is amplitude?
The height of the crests of a wave.
What is color purity?
The number of wavelengths that make up the light.
What is a pupil?
A hole in the iris where light enters the eye.
What is the iris?
The colored muscle circling the pupil.
What is the lens?
A membrane at the front of the eye that focuses on the incoming light on the retina.
What is the processes of accommodation and what does it do?
Adjustment of the lens’s thickness by specialized muscles in order to change the degree to which it bends light.
What is the retina?
A surface on the back of the eye that contains the photoreceptor cells.
What are the different cells in the retina and what do they do?
They two different cells in the retina are the rods and cones. The rods support nighttime vision and the cones are responsible for high-resolution color vision.
What is myopia (aka nearsightedness)?
It’s when faraway objects are projected too in front of the fovea.
What is hyperopia (aka farsightedness)?
It’s when a near object overshoots the back of the eye, behind the fovea.
What is the optic nerve?
A bundle of axons that converge from the retina and transmit action potentials to the brain.
What is a blind spot?
An area in the middle of the visual field where there are no photoreceptors and no information can be received.
What is the trichromatic theory?
A theory of color perception stating that three types of cone cells, each most sensitive to a specific wavelength of light, work together to produce our perception of a multicolored world.
What is the opponent-process theory?
A theory of color perception stating that information from the cones is separated into three sets of opposing or opponent channels in the ganglion cell layer.
What are feature detectors?
Specialized cells in the visual cortex that respond to basic features like lines, edges, and angles.
What is the visual association cortex?
The region of the brain where objects are reconstructed from prior knowledge and information collected by the feature detectors.
What is prosopagnosia?
A visual disorder in which individuals are unable to recognize the identity of faces.
What is phi phenomenon?
A visual illusion in which the flashing of separate images in rapid succession is perceived as fluid movement.
