Basic Concepts
What are the five senses?
The five senses are sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch.
The process of choosing which sensory info to focus on
selection
Retina
This is a light sensitive layer of tissue at the back of the eye that converts light into neural signals.
Cochlea
Spiral cavity in the inner ear contains corti which produces nerve impulses in response to sound vibrations.
What is gustation?
The sense of taste
Absolute Threshold
The weakest amount of a stimulus that a person can detect half the time.
Basic steps of perceptual processing
selection, organization, interpretation
Rods
Rods are highly sensitive to light for peripheral and black and white vision.
Frequency
The number of sound wave cycles per second.
Chemical senses
Taste and smell
Difference Threshold
The amount of difference a person can detect between two stimuli half the time.
This term describes how your brain makes sense of raw sensory input
perception
Cones are less sensitive to light and are responsible for color vision and sharp detail in bright light.
Amplitude
The strength or pressure of the sound wave.
What are the five taste experiences?
Sour, sweet, salty, bitter, and umami
Perceptual set
You are prepared to see what you WANT to see.
what is figure ground perception
The ability to distinguish between an object and its background.
Depth Perception
Depth perception is the ability to recognize distances and three dimensionality (develops in infancy).
What is Sensorineural deafness?
A type of hearing loss that happens when the inner ear or hearing nerve is damaged.
sensory adaptation
This is the process where our sensory receptors become less sensitive to a constant or a repetitive stimulus over time
What is an illusion?
Illusions are incorrect perceptions.
What is signal-detection theory?
Signal-detection theory is the summary of our tendency to make correct judgements in detecting the presence of stimuli.
Blind spot
A small area in your vision where your optic nerve exits the retina creating a gap in your vision
What do the hair cells on the inner ear do?
They convert sound waves into electrical signals for the brain.
Transduction
The process of converting something from one form, place, or concept to another.