Unit 3 - Sensation and Perception

Question 1

sensation

Answer 1

process by which sensory receptors receive information from environment

Question 2

perception

Answer 2

process of organising and interpreting sensory information

Question 3

bottom-up processing

Answer 3

analysis that begins with sense receptors and works up to the brains integration of sensory information

Question 4

top-down processing

Answer 4

information processing guided by higher-level mental process, as when we construct perceptions drawing out our experience and expectation

Question 5

selective attention

Answer 5

processes that allow an individual to select and focus on particular input for further processing while simultaneously suppressing irrelevant or distracting information

Question 6

inattentional blindness

Answer 6

when an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight, purely as a result of lack of attention

Question 7

change blindness

Answer 7

a phenomenon of visual perception that occurs when a stimulus undergoes a change without this being noticed by its observer

Question 8

transduction

Answer 8

transforming of stimulus energies into neural impulses our brain can interpret

Question 9

psychophysics

Answer 9

study of relationship between physical characteristic of stimuli and psychological experience of them

Question 10

absolute threshold

Answer 10

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

Question 11

signal detection theory

Answer 11

theory predicting how and when we detect presence of faint stimuli amid background stimulation; assumes no single absolute threshold and focuses more on the processing of briefly stored information

Question 12

subliminal

Answer 12

“below threshold” ; below ones absolute threshold for conscious awareness