Psych 101 - Midterm essay questions Flashcards
Sensation
An awareness resulting from the stimulation of a sense organ.
Perception
The organization and interpretation of sensations by the brain.
They both work seamlessly to allow us to experience the world through our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. Also allow us to combine what we are currently learning from the environments with what we already know about it to make judgements and to choose appropriate behaviours.
Transduction
The conversion of stimuli detected by receptor cells to electrical impulses that are then transported to the brain, in different, but related ways.
Absolute threshold
The intensity of a stimulus that allows an organism to detect it 50% of the time.
Subliminal
If the stimulus is detected less than half the time.
Signal detection analysis
A technique used to determine the ability of the perceiver to separate true signals from background noise.
Sensitivity
The ability of the individual to detect the presence or absence of signals.
Judgement (or response)
Refers to the decision about the presence of a stimulus which is independent of sensitivity.
Our judgements are decisions that have consequences for our behaviour.
Difference Threshold (or just noticeable difference - JND)
The change in stimulus that can just barely be detected by the organism.
Weber made an important discovery about JND - that the ability to detect differences depends not so much on the size of the difference, but on the size of the difference in relation to the absolute size of the stimulus.
Weber’s Law
Maintains that the JND of a stimulus is a constant proportion of the original intensity.
f you have a cup of coffee with one tsp of sugar and then you add another, you will notice a difference in the sweetness. If you have a cup of coffee with 5 tsp of sugar and then you add another, you most likely will not be able to tell very much. According to Weber’s law, you would have to add 5 more tsp to make the same difference.
Subliminal advertising
Advertises a product outside of our awareness. Has been banned in many countries, but the effectiveness has not been shown to be of large magnitude in experiments.
Blindsight
A condition in which people are unable to consciously report on visual stimuli, but they are still able to accurately answer questions about what they are seeing.
Visual cortex has been damaged.
Selective Attention
Ability to focus on some sensory inputs while tuning out others.
Cocktail party phenomenon
The ability to focus one’s attention a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli (i.e., noise).
Sensory Adaptation
The second process of perception is sensory adaption, which is decreased sensitivity to a stimulus after prolonged and constant exposure (ie. stepping into a cold pool and then after a while it doesn’t feel bad).
Our sensitivity diminishes and we no longer perceive it.
Essential to our survival, because it allows us to focus on stimuli that are not constant, but that are changing.
