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Description
Flashcards by Greg MacPherson, updated 4 months ago
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Created by Greg MacPherson
almost 3 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| Unit Three - Module 17 Basic Concepts of Sensation and Perception | Basic Concepts of Sensation and Perception |
| sensation | The process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment. |
| sensory receptors | Nerve endings that respond to stimuli, and detect information after which the nervous system transmits this information to the brain. |
| perception | The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events. |
| bottom-up processing | The process that begins with individual pieces of data and works its way "up" to construct a theory or conclusion. This often occurs when we process things for which we have no prior knowledge. |
| top-down processing | The process that constructs perceptions based on sensory experience and expectations. This occurs by drawing on prior knowledge. |
| Selective attention | The focussing of our conscious awareness on a particular stimulus. Through selective attention, our awareness focusses on a minute aspect of all that we experience. |
| Cocktail Party Effect | The ability to attend to one of several speech streams while ignoring others, as when one is at a cocktail party. |
| The Stroop Effect | The delay in reaction time between congruent and incongruent stimuli. For example, the time it takes a participant to name the colour of ink in which a word is printed is longer for words that denote incongruent colour names than for neutral words or for words that denote a congruent colour. |
| inattentional blindness | Failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere. |
| inattentional deafness | The failure of unattended auditory stimuli to register in the consciousness. |
| change blindness | A phenomenon of visual perception that occurs when a stimulus undergoes a change without this being noticed by its observer. |
| change deafness | A phenomenon of auditory perception that occurs when a stimulus undergoes a change without this being noticed by its observer. |
| pop-out effect | One or more basic features will mark a stimulus as distinct from the other stimuli, hence allowing the target to be easily detected and identified regardless of the number of distractors. |
| choice blindness | The inability to detect a change between an object/image we have chosen and a similar object/image. |
| transduction | The conversion of one form of energy into another. In sensation, the transforming of stimulus energies, such as sights, sounds, and smells, into neural impulses our brain can interpret. |
| psychophysics | The study of the relationships between the physical characteristics of stimuli, such as their intensity, and our psychological experience of them. |
| absolute threshold | The minimum stimulation (stimulus energy) necessary to detect a particular stimulus (light, sound, pressure, taste, or odour) 50 percent of the time. |
| signal detection theory | The theory that predicts how and when we can detect the presence of a faint stimulus amid background stimulation (noise). This theory assumes that there is no single absolute threshold, but rather that detection depends on one's psychological state. |
| subliminal | Below one's absolute threshold for conscious awareness. |
| priming | The activation, often unconsciously, of certain associations, thus predisposing one's perception, memory, or response. |
| difference threshold (just noticeable difference- JND) | The minimum difference between two stimuli required for detection 50 percent of the time. We experience the difference threshold as a just noticeable difference (JND). The detectable difference increases with the size of the stimulus. |
| Weber's Law | For an average person to perceive a difference, two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage (not a constant amount). The exact percentage varies depending on the stimulus. |
| habituation | The tendency of the brain to stop attending to constant, unchanging information. |
| dehabituation | The opposite of habituation, which is the reappearance of the initial response to an original stimulus once the stimulus changes. |
| sensory adaptation | A process by which constant, unchanging information from the sensory receptors is effectively ignored because the receptor cells themselves become less responsive to an unchanging stimulus and the receptors no longer send signals to the brain. |
| microsaccades (saccadic movements) | A constant movement of the eyes through tiny little vibrations. |
| Gustav Fechner | The founder of psychophysics. He studied the edge of sensory awareness which he referred to as absolute threshold. |
| Ernst Weber | Came up with the principle now known as Weber's Law |
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