Sensation & Perception
The process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimuli from our environment.
What is Sensation?
The focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus.
What is selective attention?
The minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the time.
What is Absolute Threshold?
This part of your eye is a muscle & controls your pupil.
What is the Iris?
A misrepresentation of a “real” sensory stimulus
What is an Illusion?
Information processing starting at the top with higher level cognitive processes (such as expectations and knowledge).
What is Top-Down?
This is where you attend to one voice among many, whether or not you are paying attention.
What is the cocktail party effect?
Below one’s absolute threshold for conscious awareness, unable to sense the stimulus.
What is Subliminal Threshold?
These receptors in you eye allow you to see at night and give you peripheral vision.
What are Rods?
This allows for you to perceive depth, that depend on the use of two eyes
What are Binocular Cues?
Information processing beginning with raw sensory data that are sent up to the brain for higher level analysis
What is Bottom-Up?
This study showed how we miss things in our line of vision when we are paying attention to something else.
What is the Gorilla Study?
The study of relationships between the physical characteristics of stimuli (such as their intensity) and our psychological experience of them.
What is Psychophysics?
The length of this determines what hue you see.
What is Wavelength?
This type of illusion integrates pieces of information into meaningful wholes
What is Gestalt?
The process or organizing and interpreting sensory information, allowing us to recognize meaningful objects and events
What is Perception?
This is the failure to notice changes in the environment.
What is Change Blindness?
The minimum difference between two stimuli required for detection 50% of the time.
What is Difference Threshold?
When it comes to anything that we see, what is it called?
What is Visible Light, Light Energy or Electromagnetic Energy?
The organization of the visual field into objects that stand out from their surroundings.
What is Figure-ground?
This activity illustrates the difference between top-down and bottom-up processing.
What is the Stroop Effect?
This is failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere.
What is Inattentional Blindness?
The principle that, to be perceived as different, two stimuli must differ by a constant percentage (rather than a constant amount)
What is Weber's Law?
This structure in your eye is why we have a blind spot in our vision.
What is the Optic Nerve?
This is a special illusion where one person appears tall on the right side of the room and the other appears small on the left side of the room.
What is the Ames Room?