Sensation And Perception Flashcards
The process by which sense organs gather information about the environment and transmit it to the brain for initial processing.
Sensation
The process by which the brain selects, organises and interprets sensations.
Perception
These three basic principles apply across all senses.
There is no one to one correspondence between physical and psychological reality.
Sensation and perception are active, not passive.
Sensory and perceptual processes reflect the impact of adaptive pressures over the course of evolution.
Sound travels in ____
Waves
Sound waves occur when a vibrating object sets — —- in motion
Air particles
Sound frequency is experienced as:
Pitch
This refers to the number of times air particles ____ per second.
Oscillate
The loudness of a sound reflects the height and depth, or _____ of a wave.
Amplitude
The number of cycles per second in a sound wave, expressed in hertz and responsible for the experience of pitch.
Frequency
The psychological property corresponding to the frequency of a sound wave, the quality of the tone from low to high.
Pitch
The difference between the minimum and maximum pressure levels in a sound wave. Measured in decibels, corresponding to the psychological property of loudness.
Amplitude
The part of the ear that collects and magnifies sound in the air.
The outer ear
The part of the ear that converts waves of air pressure into movements of tiny bones
Middle ear
The part of the ear that transforms the movements of the malleus, stapeus and incus into waves in fluid that generate neural signals.
Inner ear
The psychological properties of sound
Pitch, loudness, timbre
The psychological properties of vision
Hue, brightness, saturation
Light is a form of — —
Electromagnetic radiation
The two basic processes that occur in the eye:
Light focused on the retina by the cornea, pupil and lens.
The retina then converts this visual image into a code that the brain can read.
The neural pathway involved in eye movements.
Optic nerve
Superior colliculus in the midbrain
Passage of light signals from the optic nerve onwards.
Optic nerve, lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus, visual cortex in occipital lobe.
What is the ‘what’ pathway?
The pathway running from the striate cortex in the occipital lobes through the lower part of the temporal lobes, involved in determining what an object is.
What is the ‘where’ pathway?
The pathway running from the striate cortex through the middle and upper regions of the temporal lobes and up into the parietal lobes, involved in locating an object in space, following its movement and guiding movement towards it.
This theory states that the eye contains three types of receptors for red, green and blue.
Young-Helmholtz or trichromatic theory.
The colours and after-images we perceive reflect three antagonistic colour systems: blue-yellow, red-green, black-white.
Opponent-process theory
Transduction of smell
Olfaction
Where does olfaction occur?
Olfactory epithelium
Transduction of taste occurs in the:
Tastebuds
The —– senses register body position and movement.
Proprioceptive senses
What are the proprioceptive senses?
Vestibular sense and kinaesthesia
The process of converting stimulus information into neural impulses.
Transduction
The minimum amount of energy needed for an observer to sense that a stimulus is present.
Absolute threshold
The lowest level of stimulation required to sense that a change in stimulation has occurred.
Difference threshold
The tendency of sensory systems to respond less to stimuli that continue without change.
Sensory adaptation
The process of integrating sensations into meaningful perceptual units.
Perceptual organisation
The four aspects of perceptual organisation:
Form perception, depth perception, motion perception and perceptual constancy.
The process of generating meaning from sensory experience.
Perceptual interpretation
Perceptual processing that starts with raw sensory data that feed ‘up’ to the brain. What is perceived is determined largely by the features of the stimuli reaching the sense organs.
Bottom-up processing
The influence of prior experience on perception. Perception that starts with the observer’s expectations and knowledge.
Top-down processing
Specialised cells that respond to stimuli and generate action potentials in adjacent sensory neurons.
Sensory receptors
The theory that states that experiencing a sensation means making a judgement about whether a stimulus is present or not.
Signal detection theory
In signal detection theory, the participant’s readiness to report detecting a signal when uncertain.
Response bias
The smallest difference in intensity between two stimuli that a person can detect.
Just noticeable difference
The law that states that for two stimuli to be perceived as differing in intensity, the second must differ from the first by a constant proportion.
Weber’s law
The subjective magnitude of a sensation grows as a proportion of the logarithm of the stimulus.
Fecher’s law
The subjective intensity of a stimulus grows as a proportion of the actual intensity raised to some power.
Steven’s power law
The tendency of sensory systems to respond less to ongoing stimuli.
Sensory adaptation
The tendency of our brains to filter out and ignore intermittent stimuli.
Habituation
The photoreceptor that picks up on black or white and is activated in dim light
Rod
The photoreceptor that is designed for colour vision and the perception of fine detail.
Cones
Neurons in the retina that combine information from many receptors and excite ganglion cells.
Bipolar cells
The axons of these cells bundle together to form the optic nerve.
Ganglion cells
Bundles of axons of ganglion cells which carries information from the retina to the brain.
Optic nerve
The central region of the retina.
The fovea
The point on the retina where the optic nerve leaves the eye, which has no receptor cells.
Blind spot
The higher the frequency, the higher the …
Pitch
The texture of a sound.
Timbre
A device that enables the deaf to hear by electrically stimulating the inner ear to produce sound sensations.
Cochlear implant
These tiny hairs produce sound waves in the fluid of the Eustachian tubes.
Stereocilia
A theory of pitch which proposes that different areas of the basilar membrane are maximally sensitive to different frequencies.
Place theory
The theory of pitch that asserts that perceived pitch reflects the rate of vibration of the basilar membrane.
Frequency theory
Distinguishing between the foreground and background.
Figure ground
A rule of perception that states the brain tends to group similar objects together.
Similarity
The theory that the brain tends to group objects together that are close to one another.
Proximity
The brain organises stimuli into continuous lines or patterns rather than discontinuous elements.
Good continuatuon
People tend to perceive the simplest pattern possible.
Simplicity
People perceiving incomplete figures as complete.
Closure
People perceiving and categorising objects by first breaking them down into elementary units.
Recognition by components
Visual input integrated from two eyes that provide depth perception.
Binocular cues
Visual input from one eye that contributes to depth perception.
Monocular cues
When one object blocks part of another, we perceive the obstructed object as more distant. A monocular cue.
Interposition
Nearby objects go fast, distant objects go slow. A monocular depth cue.
Motion parallax
The illusion where two lines of equal length appear to differ in size.
Müller Lyer illusion
The three types of perceptual constancy.
Shape constancy, colour constancy, size constancy
