SELECTIVE ATTENTION
This ability to focus on one stimulus while ignoring hundreds of millions of others is called what?
Selective attention
What is the term for the conversion of sensory stimulus energy into action potentials?
Transduction
Is perception a physical process or a psychological process?
Psychological
The minimum amount of stimulus energy needed to be detected 50% of the time is called what?
Absolute threshold
Mental frameworks or belief systems that shape how people view the world are called what?
Schemas
In a noisy classroom, a student hears their name called across the room. What phenomenon allows them to detect their name among all the background noise?
Cocktail party effect
What are the specialized neurons that detect specific types of stimuli called?
Sensory receptors
Bottom-up processing begins with what detecting signals?
Sensory receptors
The smallest amount of change in a stimulus that you can detect is called what?
Noticeable Difference
A child sees a penguin for the first time and realizes it's a bird that doesn't fly. Is this assimilation or accommodation?
Accommodation
A radiologist scanning medical images must focus on small abnormalities while ignoring normal tissue. Why is selective attention critical for this task?
Filters irrelevant information
A dog can detect odors that humans cannot. This means a dog has a lower threshold for what sense?
Smell/Olfaction
A child touches a hot stove and feels pain. What type of processing detects this pain signal first?
Bottom-up processing
According to Weber's Law, does a bigger or smaller change need to happen to a strong stimulus for you to notice the difference?
Bigger change
When someone fits new information into an existing schema without changing it, they are engaging in what process?
Assimilation
If selective attention didn't exist, what would happen to your ability to have a conversation at a crowded party?
Sensory overload
When light enters your eye and causes chemical changes in cells at the back of the retina, what process is occurring?
Transduction
When you walk into a bakery and smell cinnamon and think of your grandmother, are you using top-down or bottom-up processing?
Top-down processing
If you increase music volume from 1 to 2, you notice the difference. At volume 100 to 101, you don't. What law explains this?
Weber's Law
If someone maintains their current beliefs and distorts new information to fit, what rationalization process are they using?
Rationalization
Explain how selective attention allows a mother to sleep through traffic noise but wake up to her baby's cry.
Prioritizes important stimuli
Explain why the same sound level might be detected as "loud" to one person but "normal" to a hearing-impaired individual.
Different thresholds
In a dark theater, you initially think you see your friend sitting nearby, but as light increases, you realize it's a stranger. Which processing type corrected your mistake?
Bottom-up processing
You're holding a book and someone adds one page. You notice the change. But if you're holding a stack of 100 pages and someone adds one page, you don't notice. What concept explains this?
Noticeable Difference
You know exactly what to do when you walk into a restaurant without being told—where to sit, how to order, when to eat. What term describes this situation-specific schema?
Scripts