S, P, & T
Your sensory organs detecting raw stimulation from the environment, such as light or sound.
What is sensation?
These receptors detect color and fine detail, are concentrated in the fovea, and need bright light.
What are cones?
Sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and this savory taste make up the five basic tastes.
What is umami?
This branch of psychology says the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
What is Gestalt psychology?
Railroad tracks seem to come together as they get farther away because of this monocular cue.
What is linear perspective?
Your brain actively interpreting and making sense of the information your senses collect.
What is perception?
These receptors (about 120 million of them) detect light and dark, shape, and movement, and work best in low light.
What are rods?
This is the only sense with a direct connection to the limbic system, which is why it can trigger such strong memories.
What is smell (olfaction)?
In the Rubin vase image, your brain switches between seeing a vase and two faces because it is separating what you focus on from the background.
What is figure-ground?
You know a car driving away is not actually shrinking, even though its image on your retina gets smaller.
What is size constancy?
You stop noticing the hum of a fan or the feel of your clothes because the stimulation stays constant.
What is sensory adaptation?
The lens focuses light onto this layer at the back of the eye that contains the light-detecting receptors.
What is the retina?
This fluid-filled, snail-shaped structure in the inner ear is where vibrations turn into neural signals.
What is the cochlea?
Your brain groups objects together because they are close to each other.
What is proximity?
If one object blocks part of another object, you see the blocking object as closer. This monocular cue is called this.
What is interposition?
The minimum amount of stimulation you can detect half the time, like seeing a candle flame 30 miles away on a dark night.
What is the absolute threshold?
The place where the optic nerve exits the eye. It has no receptors, so the brain fills in the missing information.
What is the blind spot?
This sense, located in the inner ear, controls balance. Motion sickness happens when it disagrees with what your eyes are telling you.
What is the vestibular sense?
You see an almost-complete circle, and your brain fills in the gap so you see a full circle.
What is closure?
Each eye receives a slightly different image, and the brain compares them to judge distance. This binocular cue is how 3D movies work.
What is retinal disparity?
The smallest change in a stimulus that you can notice, also called the just noticeable difference (JND).
What is the difference threshold?
You stare at a bright color for 30 seconds, then look at a white wall and see the opposite color because those color receptors got tired.
What is an afterimage?
This permanent type of hearing loss is caused by damage to the hair cells or auditory nerve. Most noise-induced hearing loss is this type.
What is sensorineural hearing loss?
ou can read a sentence full of typos without noticing them because your brain uses expectations and past experience to fill in gaps.
What is top-down processing?
In this famous illusion, two lines are exactly the same length, but the arrows on the ends make one look longer.
What is the Müller-Lyer illusion?