Unit 4/Unit 6 Flashcards
Xavier finds the smell of a new restuarant to be very strong at first, but after spending time eating in the restaurant he no longer notices the smell.
THe process of getting used to a sensory experience is referred to as
sensory adaptation
Alex can easily tell the difference between a 1-lb bag of flour and 5-lb bag, but he cannot tell the difference between lifting 200 lbs and 205 lbs in the weight room.
Which of the following explains Alex’s inability to determine the heavier weight’s differences?
Weber’s Law
If you place your finger on your nose, you will see the tip of your finger but not the tip of your nose.
Which sensory phenomena BEST explains the apparent invisibility from pyour visual field?
sensory habituation
Which of the following is MOST true about human sensation?
we can be affected by stimuli that we are unaware of having sensed
Which of the following does signal detection theory BEST help explain?
why an alert security guard is more likely to hear a faint noise at 4 am than somebody crossing the lobby after a late night of studying
Jared and Geness are parents to newborn baby Annie. Even in a crowded, noisy room, Geness can pick out Annie’s faint cry.
What term would psychologists use to explain Geness’ abiility to recognize Annie’s cry?
signal detection theory
Hubel and Wiesel identified key neurons in the occipital lobe’s visual cortex that allow the brain to respond to specifics of a stimulus such as shape, angle, and movement.
What are these nerve cells called?
feature detectors
One thing all senses have in common is that they ALL
convert the information they gather from the environment into neural signals
The process by which the senses collect energy from the environment and turn it into information the brain can interpret is called
transduction
Mrs. Gabriel was teaching a lesson on ethics and she had the students form groups of four to discuss their feelings about a controversial topic. Although the classroom got very loud, Mrs. Gabriel was able to hear her name from across the classroom when a student needed help.
Which of the following BEST describes this phenomenon?
Cocktail Party Effect
Timmy moved to a different school over the summer. At his last school, he had a very strict teacher that he was afraid of because she would yell at the class all of the time. When he came to his new school and sat in class on he first day, he perceived his new teacher as angry and strict as well, even though she was just going over the school rules that all teachers had to discuss on the first day.
What influenced Timmy’s mistaken perception?
perceptual set
When Bella was at a restaurant with her friends, she failed to notice the difference when her first waiter left to go on a break and a second waiter took his place.
Bella’s failure to notice the change in waiters is an example of
change blindness
Samantha is flipping through her psychology book when she comes across the names of colors in different colored fonts. She follows the book’s instructions and tries to say the color of the ink in which of the word is typed in instead of simply reading the words.
Doing so demonstrates which psychological concept?
how people’s minds can get confused between conscious and unconscious processing
But Did You See the Gorilla?
Inattentional Blindness
steps in vision
cornea, pupil, lens, vitreous humor, retina, bipolar cells, ganglion cells, optic nerve, thalamus, visual cortex
