chapter 3: sensation and perception

Transduction

Psychophysics

There are ___major branches of psychophysics.

2 branches of psychophysics?

2 Branches of psychophysics?

Absolute threshold

Lower the threshold, ___the sensitivity

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standard of how certain they must be that a stimulus is present before they will say they detect it

Signal detection theory

Affected by characteristics of the participants and nature of the situation

Difference threshold

Compare difference and absolute threshold.

WEBER'S LAW ****

Subliminal stimulus

diminishing sensitivity to an unchanging stimulus with the passage of time as sensory neurons habituate to the stimulation

Sensation refers to the activities by which our sense organs receive and transmit information, whereas perception involves the brain's processing and interpretation of the information.

Normal stimulus for vision?

The portion of the visual stimuli that we perceive is?

How does red compare to blue?

Cornea

Behind cornea?

Iris

Ciliary muscles STUDY

Image entering eye is ____ by the lens and then ____on the retina, which contains ______cells.

Thinner to focus on distant objects; thicker to focus on nearby objects;

behind pupil; reverses image and focuses it on the retina

near-sightedness; light focused before retina; eyeball longer than normal

Hyperopia

STUDY: PARTS OF THE EYE

STUDY: PATHWAY THROUGH RETINA

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RODS

cones

Cones ___ in concentration?
Rods?

Bipolar cells

Ganglion cells

Visual acuity

Rods and cones translate light waves into nerve impulses through the action of protein molecules called

is the progressive improvement in brightness sensitivity that occurs over time under conditions of low illumination

Trichromatic theory

the theory proposed by Hering that the retina contains three sets of colour receptors that respond differentially to red-green, blue-yellow, and black-white; the opponent processes that result can produce a perception of any hue

Dual-process theory

Colour blindness?

the area of the occipital lobe which receives impulses generated from the retina via the thalamus and analyzes visual input by using its feature detectors

sensory neurons that respond to particular features of a stimulus, such as its shape, angle, or colour

Parallel processing

cortical areas in the occipital, parietal, and temporal lobes that analyze visual stimuli sent to the primary visual cortex in relation to stored knowledge and that establish the “meaning” of the stimuli

is the technical measure of cycles per second

the number of sound waves, or cycles, per second

refers to the vertical size of the sound waves—that is, to the amount of compression and expansion of the molecules in the conducting medium.

The sound wave's ______ is the primary determinant of the sound's perceived loudness

Differences in amplitude are expressed as_____ , a measure of the physical pressures that occur at the eardrum

a small coil-shaped structure of the inner ear that contains the receptors for sound

a membrane that runs the length of the cochlea and contains the organ of Corti and its sound receptor hair cells

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study

structure embedded in the basilar membrane that contains the hair cell receptors for sound

the theory of pitch perception that holds that the number of nerve impulses sent to the brain by the hair cells of the cochlea corresponds to the frequency of the sound wave; this theory is accurate at low frequencies

the theory of pitch perception that holds that sound frequencies are coded in terms of the portion of the basilar membrane where the fluid wave in the cochlea peaks; this theory accounts for perception of frequencies above 4000 Hz

Conduction deafness

hearing loss caused by damage to the cochlear receptor cells or the auditory nerve

Gustation

Olfaction

are chemical senses because their receptors are sensitive to chemical molecules rather than to some form of energy

the receptors for taste in the tongue and in the roof and back of the mouth that are sensitive to the qualities of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter

Olfactory bulb

chemical signals found in natural body scents

The tendency for some women who live together over time to become more similar to one another in the timing of their menstrual cycles

theory that proposes that the experience of pain results from the opening and closing of “gating mechanisms” in the nervous system

Endorphin

the body sense that provides feedback on the position and movements of our body parts

the sense of body orientation or equilibrium

devices that provide sensory input that can, to some extent, substitute for what blind and deaf people are not supplied by their sensory receptors

Bottom-up processing.

Top-down processing

Perception is selective . People are given

Shadowing

Unattentional blindness.

Unattentionsl blindness

Figure ground relations

Gestalt laws

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