Psychology Chapter 4 - Basic terms and concepts and sensation and perception

Question 1

What is an illusion?

Answer 1

Alters perception of a stimulus so it doesn’t match physical reality.

Question 2

What is sensation?

Answer 2

Refers to the detection of physical energy by our sense organs, including your eyes, ears, skin, nose and tongue, which then relay the information to the brain.

Question 3

What is perception?

Answer 3

The brain’s interpretation of raw sensory inputs.

Question 4

What is transduction?

Answer 4

Process by which the nervous system converts an external stimulus into electrical signals within neurons.

Question 5

What is a sense receptor?

Answer 5

Specialized cell that transduces a specific stimulus.

Question 6

The greatest activation of our senses occurs when we _________ detect a stimulus.

Answer 6

First

Question 7

What is sensory adaptation?

Answer 7

Neural or sensory receptors change/reduce their sensitivity to a continuous, unchanging stimuli.

Question 8

Where does adaptation take place?

Answer 8

At the level of the sense receptor.

Question 9

What does sensory adaptation allow us to do?

Answer 9

Conserve energy for more important stimuli

Question 10

What is psychophysics?

Answer 10

The study of how we perceive stimuli based on their physical characteristics.

Question 11

What is the absolute threshold of a stimulus?

Answer 11

The lowest level of a stimulus we can detect on 50% of the trials when no other stimuli is present.

Question 12

What is the Just noticeable difference?

Answer 12

The smallest change in the intensity of a stimulus that we can detect. This is relevant in our ability to distinguish a stronger stimulus from a weaker one.

Question 13

What is Weber’s Law?

Answer 13

States that there’s a constant proportional relationship between the just noticeable difference and the original stimulus intensity. (The stronger the stimulus, the bigger the change needed for a change in stimulus intensity to be noticeable.

Question 14

What is signal detection theory?

Answer 14

Used to describe how we detect stimuli under certain conditions.
ex: talking to friend over phone with a lot of background noise, we need to speak louder for our friend to understand.

Question 15

What is the signal-to-noise ratio?

Answer 15

Compares the level of desired signal to the level of background noise.

Question 16

What are response biases?

Answer 16

Tendency to make one type of guess over another when we’re in doubt about whether a weak signal is present of absent under noisy conditions. False positives or negatives implications often plays a role. (ex: if defusing a bomb, would be more likely to say its real then not if unsure)

Question 17

What are specific nerve energies?

Answer 17

States that even though there are many distinct stimulus energies, the sensation we experience is determined by the nature of the sense receptor, not the stimulus.

Question 18

What are phosphenes?

Answer 18

Vivid sensations of light caused by pressure on your eye’s receptor cells?

Question 19

What do phosphenes validate?

Answer 19

Specific nerve energies.

Question 20

What is synesthesia?

Answer 20

A condition in which people experience cross-modal sensations, like hearing sounds when they see colours.

Question 21

What is grapheme colour synesthesia?

Answer 21

in which numbers are associated with certain colours.

Question 22

What is lexical state synesthesia?

Answer 22

Words have associated tastes.

Question 23

What is peculiar of synethesia?

Answer 23

Even if children aren’t synesthetes, they tend to associate letters with colours but, as we age, we lose this.

Question 24

What is parallel processing?

Answer 24

Ability to attend to many sense modalities simultaneously.

Question 25

What is bottom-up processing?

Answer 25

We construct a whole from parts. This kind of processing begins with activity in the primary visual cortex, followed by processing in the association cortex.

Question 26

What is top-down processing?

Answer 26

We start with our beliefs and expectations, which we then impose on the raw stimuli we perceive.
Top down processing starts with processing in the association cortex, followed by processing in the primary visual cortex.

Question 27

What are perceptual sets?

Answer 27

When our expectations influence our perceptions. (Think of the mishapen letter example in the book where the surrounding letters made them look like A’s)

Question 28

What is perceptual constancy?

Answer 28

Process by which we perceive stimuli consistently across varied conditions.

Question 29

What is an example of shape constancy?

Answer 29

We still see a door as a door whether its completely shut, open or barely open.

Question 30

What is size constancy?

Answer 30

Our ability perceive objects as the same size no matter how far away they are from us.

Question 31

What is colour constancy?

Answer 31

Our ability to perceive colour consistently across different levels of lighting.

Question 32

What is selective attention?

Answer 32

Allow us to select one channel and turn off the others (tv example), or at least turn down their volume.

Question 33

What are the major brain regions associated with selective attention?

Answer 33

The RAS and forebrain. These areas activate regions of the cerebral cortex, such as the frontal cortex, during selective attention.

Question 34

What is the filter theory of attention?

Answer 34

Views attention as a bottleneck through which information passes. This mental filter allows us to pay attention to important stimuli and ignore others.

Question 35

What is dichotic listening?

Answer 35

Subjects hear two different messages, one delivered to the left ear and one to the right ear. They were asked to ignore certain messages (i.e. left ear messages). When asked about the ignored messages, they seemed to know little or nothing of them.

Question 36

What is shadowing?

Answer 36

Dichotic listening where participants had to repeat the messages they heard. Sometimes they would mix in some of the information they were supposed to ignore, especially if it made sense to add it.

Question 37

What is the cocktail party effect?

Answer 37

Refers to our ability to pick out an important message, like our name, in a conversation that doesn’t involve us.

Question 38

What is inattentional blindness?

Answer 38

Failure to detect stimuli that is in plain sight when our attention is focused elsewhere.

Question 39

What is change blindness?

Answer 39

Failure to detect obvious changes in one’s environment.

Question 40

What is the binding problem?

Answer 40

When we perceive a stimuli, different regions of our brains process different aspects of it. Our brains then manage to bind these diverse pieces of information together into a unified whole.

Question 41

What is subliminal perception?

Answer 41

The processing of sensory information that occurs below the limen; that is, the level of conscious awareness. The effects of subliminal information often vanish when subjects become aware of or even suspect attempts to influence them subliminally.

Question 42

What is subliminal persuasion?

Answer 42

Subthreshold, influences over our votes in elections, product choices, and life decisions.

Question 43

What it the illusory placebo effect?

Answer 43

Subjects didn’t improve at all, but thought they had. Ex: people getting self help tapes think they improve, even if they don’t

Question 44

What is sensory habituation?

Answer 44

Pattern of decreased response to a stimulus after frequently repeated exposure.