unit 5: perception Flashcards
what is selective attention?
reacting to certain stimuli selectively when several occur simultaneously
what is change blindness?
phenomenon where subjects fail to detect even a large change in the visual scene
what is transduction?
the transportation or transformation of something from one form, place, or concept to another.
what is psychophysics
relationships between physical stimuli and mental phenomena.
what is absolute threshold?
the smallest amount of stimulation needed for a person to detect that stimulus 50% of the time
what is signal detection theory
differentiating a person’s ability to discriminate the presence and absence of a stimulus (or different stimulus intensities) from the criterion the person uses to make responses to those stimuli.
what is subliminal stimuli
sensory stimuli below an individual’s threshold for conscious perception
what is webers law
psychological law quantifying the perception of change in a given stimulus.
what does ESP stand for?
extra sensory perception, things perceived from other inputs like telepathy
what determines colors?
wavelength and intensity
what is gestalt?
an organized whole. emphasized tendency to make information into a whole picture
what is figure-ground?
the organization of the visual field into objects (the figures) that stand out from their surroundings (the ground).
what is grouping?
the perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into coherent groups.
what is depth perception?
the ability to see objects in three dimensions although the images that strike the retina are two-dimensional; allows us to judge distance.
what is visual cliff?
a laboratory device for testing depth perception in infants and young animals.
what is retinal disparity
the brain computes distance/depth by comparing images from both retinas – the greater the difference between the two images, the closer the object.
what are binocular cues
depth cues, such as retinal disparity, that depend on the use of two eyes.
what is the McGurk effect?
an illusion whereby speech sounds are often mis-categorized when the auditory cues in the stimulus conflict with the visual cues from the speaker’s face
what is Sensory Interaction?
the principle that one sense may influence another, as when the smell of food influences its taste.
what is Embodied Cognition?
in psychological science, the influence of bodily sensations, gestures, and other states of cognitive preferences and judgments.
what is Vestibular Sense?
the sense of body movement and position, including the sense of balance.
what is Kinethesia?
the system for sensing the position and movement of individual body parts.
what is gate control theory?
some pain messages have a higher priority than others, and only so many messages can be inside the gate at once
what is the Papillae
the bumps on tongue that taste things
what is the olfactory bulb
A rounded mass of tissue that contains several types of nerve cells that are involved in the sense of smell
what is the absolute threshold
smallest amount of stimuli we can detect
what stimulis are subliminal
all that fall below the threshold
what is difference threshold?
the amount of change that needs to notice before you notice
what is webers law?
historically important psychological law quantifying the perception of change in a given stimulus.
what is signal detection theory?
effects of distractions we experience
what is schemata?
mental representation of what we expect
what is perceptual set?
predisposition to perceiving something in a certain way
