Sensation and Sensory Processes
The process by which sensory organs detect stimuli from the environment.
What is sensation?
The part of the eye that controls how much light enters.
What is the pupil?
The sensory receptor organ for hearing, located in the inner ear.
What is the cochlea?
The sensory system responsible for detecting body position, movement, and balance.
What is the vestibular system?
The process by which the brain interprets and organizes sensory information.
What is perception?
The minimum amount of stimulation needed for a sensory system to detect a stimulus 50% of the time.
What is the absolute threshold?
The light-sensitive structure at the back of the eye that contains photoreceptors.
What is the retina?
The part of the ear that amplifies sound vibrations before they reach the inner ear.
What is the middle ear?
The specialized sensory neurons for detecting pain.
What are nociceptors?
The ability to perceive objects as unchanging despite changes in sensory input, such as lighting or distance.
What is perceptual constancy?
The principle that two stimuli must differ by a constant proportion, rather than a constant amount, to be perceived as different.
What is Weber’s Law?
The two types of photoreceptor cells in the retina.
What are rods and cones
The theory that different frequencies of sound waves activate different places on the basilar membrane.
What is place theory?
This theory explains how the spinal cord can block or allow pain signals to pass to the brain.
What is the gate-control theory of pain?
The tendency to perceive objects as belonging together when they are close to each other.
What is the Gestalt principle of proximity?
The process by which sensory receptors convert stimuli into neural signals.
What is transduction?
This theory states that color vision is based on three types of cones sensitive to red, green, and blue light.
What is the trichromatic theory of color vision?
This unit measures the loudness of sound.
What is a decibel?
The chemical senses that detect molecules in the air and in food.
What are smell and taste?
The ability to perceive depth using cues from both eyes.
What is binocular depth perception?
The ability to detect a stimulus depends on the intensity of the stimulus and the physical and psychological state of the observer.
What is signal detection theory?
The point at which the optic nerve leaves the eye, creating a small region without visual receptors.
What is the blind spot?
The ability to locate the origin of a sound based on differences in time and intensity between the ears.
What is sound localization?
The five basic taste sensations detected by the tongue.
What are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami?
The phenomenon in which prior knowledge and expectations influence perception.
What is top-down processing?