Sensation and Perception

Question 1

Sensation

Answer 1

process by which our sense receive and represent stimuli from our environment

Question 2

Perception

Answer 2

process of organizing and interpreting info from sensory
- enables us to recognize meaningful objects and events

Question 3

Prosopagnosia

Answer 3

complete sensation but incomplete perception

Question 4

Absolute Threshold

Answer 4

minimum stimuli to detect a stimuli 50% of the time

Question 5

Signal Detection Theory

Answer 5

assumes there is no absolute threshold
- detection depends on a person’s experience, fatigue, etc.

Question 6

Subliminal Messaging

Answer 6

Priming - the activation of certain associations influencing one’s memory or response
- much of our info processing occurs automatically

Question 7

Weber’s Law

Answer 7

Principle that, to be perceived as different, two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage
- aka the “just noticeable difference”

Question 8

Parts of the Eye & What they Do

Answer 8

Cornea (light enters), Iris, Pupil (size of pupil is adjusted by iris), lens (focuses rays), retina, and optic nerve (goes to brain)

Question 9

Frequency

Answer 9

length of sound waves determines pitch (highness or lowness)
- long waves have low frequency which gives a low pitch

Question 10

Near sightedness vs. far sightedness

Answer 10

Near = the eye is too long, light rays focus in front of retina (blurry at a distance)
Far = eye is too short, light rays focus behind retina (blurry close up)

Question 11

Parallel Processing

Answer 11

putting together several aspects of a problem simultaneously
- color, motion, form, depth

Question 12

Trichromatic Theory

Answer 12

theory that retina contains three types of color receptors — green, red, & blue
- colorblind people have cones that don’t work properly

Question 13

Opponent Processing Theory

Answer 13

theory that opposing retinal processes enable color vision

Question 14

Hearing - order of process

Answer 14

Pinna (outer-ear) —> eardrum —> middle ear (hammer, anvil, stirrup) —> oval window —> cochlea —> hair cells

Question 15

Taste

Answer 15

Five tastes = sweet, sour, salty, bitter, meaty
- each bump on your tongue is about 200+ taste buds
- adults have weaker taste buds

Question 16

Smell

Answer 16

• odors are deeply linked to memory
• humans have 20 million receptors
• there are roughly 10,000 odors
• Herz experiment

Question 17

Kinesthetic Sense

Answer 17

system for sensing the position and movement of individual body parts

Question 18

Vestibular Sense

Answer 18

sense of body movement and position
- tied with balance
- located in semicircular canals
Feeling of dizziness

Question 19

Selective Attention

Answer 19

the focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus
- cocktail party effect

Question 20

Inattentional Blindness

Answer 20

failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere

Question 21

Gestalt

Answer 21

Emphasizes our tendency to integrate pieces of into meaningful wholes

Question 22

The 5 Ways of Grouping

Answer 22

Proximity - groups things that are nearby together
Similarity - groups that are similar
Continuity - perceive smooth continuous patterns
Connectedness - uniform and linked
Closure - fill in gaps, assume circles are blocked by illusory triangle

Question 23

Visual Cliff

Answer 23

Experiment with box and glass - gives image of cliff
- investigates depth perception

Question 24

Binocular Cues

Answer 24

crucial for depth perception

Question 25

Retinal Disparity

Answer 25

brain compares two images from two eyeballs (binocular)

Question 26

Convergence

Answer 26

extent to which eyes move inward when looking at object (binocular)

Question 27

Monocular Cues

Answer 27

depth cues available to either eye alone

Question 28

Perceptual Constancy

Answer 28

the perception of an object or quality as constant even though our sensation of the object changes
- ponzo illusion: how the brian often relies on distance cues to guess at the properties of an object that it cannot directly sense

Question 29

Mueller-Lyer Illusion

Answer 29

the apparent (perceived) length of a line depends on whether the line terminates in an arrow tail or arrowhead

Question 30

Perceptual Set

Answer 30

mental tendency to perceive one thing and not another
- old lady or young lady based on picture seen before

Question 31

Human Factor Psychology

Answer 31

branch of psych that explores how people and machines interact to make them user friendly

Question 32

ESP

Answer 32

Extrasensory perception - clairvoyance, telepathy, and precognition
- “sixth sense”

Question 33

Phi Phenomenon

Answer 33

an optical illusion that causes one to see several images in a series as moving (dots circling around)

Question 34

Stroboscopic Vision

Answer 34

the optical effect where objects appear to move at a slower speed than reality

Question 35

Transduction

Answer 35

process of changing one form of energy into another that your brain can use
- sensation —> perception = transduction

Question 36

Conduction

Answer 36

sound cannot get through outer/middle ear

Question 37

Sensorineural

Answer 37

damage to cochlea’s receptor cells
- heredity, age, over-exposure to loud noises

Question 38

Sensory Adaptation

Answer 38

diminishing sensitivity to a stimuli

Question 39

Constancy

Answer 39

perceiving objects as unchanging

Question 40

Pitch

Answer 40

highness or lowness

Question 41

Frequency

Answer 41

length of sound waves

Question 42

Rods vs. Cones

Answer 42

Rods - responsible for vision at low light levels
Cones - responsible for vision at higher light levels

Question 43

Sensory Interaction

Answer 43

principle that one sense may affect another

Question 44

Nociceptors

Answer 44

a sensory receptor for painful stimuli

Question 45

Place Theory

Answer 45

links pitch to where on the cochlea is stimulated

Question 46

Frequency Theory

Answer 46

rate of nerve impulses traveling up auditory nerve matches frequency