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AP Psychology > Unit 3 - Perception > Flashcards

Unit 3 - Perception Flashcards

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1
Q

What is bottom-up processing?

A
  • An explanation of the perception that involves starting with an incoming stimulus and working upwards until the representation of the object is formed in our minds
  • “What am I seeing?”
  • Noticing individual elements, then the entire situation
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2
Q

What is top down processing?

A
  • The process of using contextual or general knowledge to understand what we perceived
  • “Is that something I’ve seen before?”
  • Involves looking at the bigger picture
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3
Q

Bottom up processing is purely __________ driven

A

Data

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4
Q

What is selective attention?

A

The focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus

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5
Q

What is inattentional blindness?

A
  • Failing to see visible objects when our attention is elsewhere
  • Famous gorilla experiment with bouncing basketball
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6
Q

What is change blindness?

A

Failing to notice changes in the environment

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7
Q

What is an example of choice blindness from the Swedish supermarket?

A

People tasted two jams and indicated their preference. They tasted again their preferred jam and explained their preference. However, they didn’t notice that they were “retasting” their non preferred jam

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8
Q

What are the steps for transduction?

A
  • RECIEVE sensory stimulation (sensory receptor)
  • TRANSFORM that stimulation into neural impulses (transduction mechanism)
  • DELIVER the neural information to our brain (pathways)
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9
Q

What is transduction?

A

The process of converting one form of energy into another that your brain can use

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10
Q

What is psychophysics?

A

The study of relationships between the physical characteristics of stimuli, such as their intensity, and our psychological experience of them

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11
Q

What is the absolute threshold?

A

The minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the time

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12
Q

Who studied our awareness of faint stimuli and called them our absolute threshold?

A

Gustav Fechner

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13
Q

What is the signal detection theory?

A
  • A theory predicting how and when we detect the presence of a faint stimulus (signal) amid background stimulation (noise)
  • Proposes that sensory thresholds are influenced by cognitive factors
  • Assumes that there is no single absolute threshold and that detection depends partly in a persons experience, expectations, motivation, and alertness.
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14
Q

What are subliminals?

A

Stimuli you cannot detect 50% of the time

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15
Q

What is the difference threshold?

A
  • The minimum difference between two stimulus required for detection 50% of the time
  • Whether we are able to determine that two stimuli are different
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16
Q

The difference threshold increases with the _______ of the stimulus

A

Size

17
Q

What is Weber’s law?

A
  • The principle that, to be perceived as different, two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage (rather than a constant amount)
  • The amount of change needed to produce a just noticeable difference is a constant proportion of the original stimulus’ intensity
18
Q

What is sensory adaptation?

A
  • Diminished sensitivity as a consequence of constant stimulation
  • Causing lessened sensitivity to our environment
19
Q

What is a perceptual set?

A
  • A mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another
  • Influences our interpretation of a stimulus
  • Example produced by a perceptual set: Surprise at hearing an Oklahoma cowboy speak with a British accent
  • Ex: Timmy having a mean teacher, moving, and perceiving his new teacher as mean already
20
Q

What factors influence perception?

A
  • Expectations
  • Context
  • Emotions
  • Motivation
21
Q

How do motives connect to desired objects?

A

Desired objects, such as a water bottle when thirsty, seem closer

22
Q

What is ESP (extrasensory perception)

A
  • The controversial claim that perception can occur apart from sensory input
  • Includes telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition
23
Q

What is subliminal perception?

A
  • The ability to detect sensory information that is below the threshold of conscious awareness
24
Q

What is sensory habituation?

A
  • The tendency to ignore a sensory stimulus
  • Habituation takes place in the central nervous system and represents the brain’s effort to fill out distracting or irrelevant sensory information
25
Q

What is perception?

A

The process of taking sensory stimuli and organizing them into a meaningful item or experience

26
Q

What is the cocktail party effect?

A
  • A form of selective attention where individuals are able to have their attention drawn to their name, even if they are engrossed in a conversation with another individual.
  • This is because the mind may be filtering out the majority of other voices in the room but because the two-track mind is still functioning, it can draw your attention when you hear your name
27
Q

What is the stroop effect?

A
  • The Stroop effect shows that people can easily become confused when an automatic and well-practiced task, such as reading, conflicts with the conscious task of trying to say the name of the ink color.
  • Ex: Saying the color that the word is written in rather than the color that is spelled
28
Q

What is echoic memory?

A
  • The ability to repeat the last few seconds’ worth of words and sounds
29
Q

Daisy ate bad mayonnaise and, hours later, became ill. After this incident, Daisy has an aversion to mayonnaise and becomes nauseous at the sight or smell of the condiment. Psychologists would describe Daisy as having a taste aversion to mayonnaise. What happened to Daisy?

A
  • Daisy has been conditioned to associate the perception of mayonnaise with nausea and no longer enjoys the condiment.
  • Classical conditioning
30
Q

What is operant conditioning?

A
  • A method of learning that employs rewards and punishments for behavior.
  • An association is made between a behavior and a consequence (whether negative or positive) for that behavior.
31
Q

What is classical conditioning?

A
  • A learning process that occurs when two stimuli are repeatedly paired
  • A response that is at first elicited by the second stimulus is eventually elicited by the first stimulus alone.

AP Psychology (12 decks)

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