Thresholds & Adaptation
The minimum intensity of a stimulus that can be detected 50% of the time.
What is the absolute threshold
This flexible structure changes shape to focus incoming light onto the retina.
What is the lens?
These two sensory systems are known as the chemical senses.
What are taste and smell?
This coiled, fluid-filled structure of the inner ear contains the sensory receptors involved in hearing.
What is the cochlea?
This sense provides information about the position and movement of your body parts.
What is kinesthesia?
This occurs when sensory receptors become less responsive after constant exposure to an unchanging stimulus.
What is sensory adaptation
A person who sees nearby objects clearly but has difficulty seeing distant objects has this condition.
What is nearsightedness (myopia)?
Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and this savory taste are commonly identified as the five basic tastes.
What is umami?
These three tiny middle-ear bones transmit vibrations from the eardrum toward the inner ear.
What are the ossicles?
This sense helps maintain balance and provides information about head movement and spatial orientation.
What is the vestibular sense?
After getting dressed in the morning, you quickly stop noticing the feeling of your shirt against your skin.
What is sensory adaptation
A person with this extremely rare form of color-vision deficiency sees essentially no color.
What is monochromatism?
Although people often describe it as a taste, this sensation actually involves pain and temperature receptors responding to chemicals such as capsaicin.
What is spiciness?
This theory explains pitch by proposing that different frequencies activate different locations along the basilar membrane.
What is place theory?
You can close your eyes, raise your hand over your head, and still know where your arm is located because of this sense.
What is kinesthesia?
The minimum amount by which two stimuli must differ for a person to notice a difference between them.
What is the difference threshold (JND)?
According to this theory, three types of cone receptors are especially sensitive to different ranges of wavelengths commonly associated with red, green, and blue.
What is the Young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory?
When you have a stuffy nose, food may seem less flavorful because taste normally interacts strongly with this sense.
What is smell/olfaction?
lace theory is particularly useful for explaining our perception of sounds with this type of pitch.
What are high-pitched sounds?
Feeling dizzy after spinning rapidly is primarily related to this sensory system.
What is the vestibular sense?
This principle states that for a difference to be perceived, two stimuli must differ by a constant proportion rather than a constant amount.
What is Weber’s Law?
After staring at a green image and then looking at a white wall, a person may perceive a reddish afterimage. This phenomenon supports this theory.
What is the opponent-process theory?
A student walks into a room and immediately notices a strong perfume. Ten minutes later, the smell seems much weaker even though the perfume remains.
What is sensory adaptation?
Damage to hair cells in the cochlea or the auditory nerve is associated with this category of hearing loss.
What is sensorineural hearing loss?
These fluid-filled structures of the inner ear detect rotational movements of the head and contribute to balance.
What are the semicircular canals?