Making Sense of Your Senses
This membrane at the back of the eye contains the photoreceptors.
The retina
This Gestalt principle says we group objects that are close together as belonging together.
Proximity
This memory store holds about seven plus or minus two pieces of information.
Short-term memory
Language learning starts here, earlier than babbling or first words.
Before birth, in the womb.
These three tiny bones of the middle ear carry vibrations from the eardrum to the cochlea.
The ossicles
Viewers counting basketball passes often miss a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. This failure is called this.
Inattentional blindness
Knowing that Paris is the capital of France is an example of this type of long-term memory for facts.
Semantic memory
A toddler can follow “go get your shoes” but can’t yet say “shoes.” This shows that this language skill develops before that one.
Comprehension develops before production
Unlike rods, these photoreceptors come in three types and let us see color and fine detail.
Cones
A stranger asking for directions is swapped for a different person mid-conversation, and most people don’t notice. This failure to detect obvious changes is called this.
Change blindness
You remember the last few items on a grocery list best because they’re still in short-term memory. This is called this effect.
The recency effect
Your friend texts “Great, thanks a lot,” and you can’t tell whether they’re grateful or sarcastic. The text is missing this feature of spoken language.
Prosody
If you stare at a green, black, and yellow flag and then look at a white wall, you see a red, white, and blue afterimage. This supports this theory of color vision.
Opponent process theory
This is the challenge of how the brain combines separate features, like color, shape, and motion, into one unified perception of an object.
The binding problem
In Loftus and Palmer’s study, people who heard the cars “smashed” gave higher speed estimates and were more likely to falsely recall broken glass. This name describes the finding.
The misinformation effect (memory is reconstructive)
Without being taught, babies figure out which sounds go together to form words in their language just by listening. This learning mechanism is called this.
Statistical learning
From the window of a moving car, nearby trees whiz past while distant mountains barely seem to move. This monocular depth cue is at work.
Motion parallax
As your friend walks away, her image on your retina gets smaller, yet you don’t think she’s shrinking. This perceptual ability explains why.
Size constancy (perceptual constancy)
Jordan took Spanish in high school and now keeps writing Spanish words on his college French quizzes. This type of interference explains his errors.
Proactive interference (old learning interferes with new)
Genie was discovered at 13 after being raised almost without language. She learned words but never mastered grammar. Her case is evidence for this.
A critical period for first language learning