Sensation
This is the process by which sensory receptors receive and represent stimulus energies from the environment.
What is sensation?
The light-sensitive inner surface of the eye that contains the rods and cones; transduction takes place here.
What is the retina?
The receptor cells for this sense are located in the skin and detect temperature, pressure, and pain.
What is touch?
This principle describes the tendency to organize stimuli into coherent groups, often by proximity, similarity, or continuity.
What is Gestalt psychology?
The minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the time
What is absolute threshold?
This term refers to the sense of body movement and position, including the sense of balance.
What is kinesthesia?
The ability to perceive depth using only one eye.
What is monocular depth cue?
This term describes the process of converting one form of energy into another, such as transforming sensory stimuli into neural impulses.
What is transduction?
A type of optical illusion in which an image continues to appear briefly even after exposure to the actual image has ended.
What is afterimage effect?
The coiled, fluid-filled tube in the inner ear that converts sound waves into neural signals.
What is the cochlea?
This perceptual phenomenon allows us to perceive an object as unchanging even as illumination and retinal images change.
What is perceptual constancy?
This law states that to perceive a difference between two stimuli, they must differ by a constant proportion, not a constant amount.
What is Weber's Law?
These photoreceptors are responsible for color vision and function best in bright light.
What are cones?
This irreversible hearing loss is caused by damage to the cochlea's receptor cells or the auditory nerves.
What is sensorineural hearing loss?
This theory suggests that the spinal cord contains a neurological "gate" that blocks or allows pain signals to pass to the brain.
What is the gate control theory?
The visual cliff experiment tested this in infants, showing that we can probably perceive this as young as nine months old.
What is depth perception?
This sensory phenomenon occurs when repeated exposure to a stimulus results in decreased sensitivity to it.
What is sensory adaptation?
The point at which the optic nerve leaves the eye, creating a spot where no visual information is detected.
What is the blind spot?
People affected by this may have difficulty hearing soft or muffled louder sounds, or pressure or pain in one or both ears. They may also have trouble understanding speech, especially in noisy situations.
What is conduction hearing loss?
These are the five traditional types of taste detected by taste buds, with a proposed sixth type that allows us to sense the presence of fat.
What are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, and oleogustus?
The phenomenon in which we perceive the height of objects as smaller when they are farther away from us.
What is relative size?