Sensation
Any aspect of or change in the environment to which an organism responds.
What is a stimulus?
The experience of being at a party and talking to someone in one part of the room, when suddenly you hear your name being mentioned by someone in another part of the room.
What is the cocktail party effect?
The experience that comes from organizing bits and pieces of information into meaningful wholes. Used in determining shapes.
What is Gestalt?
Balance is regulated by this system in the ear.
What is the vestibular system?
Useful for night vision and are not sensitive to color.
What are rods?
The principle that the larger or stronger a stimulus, the larger the change required for an observer to notice a difference.
What is Weber's Law?
The tendency to perceive certain object in the same way regardless of changing angle, distance or lighting
What is object constancy?
When there is a familiar object or shape that has missing parts we fill in the spaces.
What is closure?
The sense of movement and body position.
What is proprioception?
Lesson the pain by shifting our attention away from the pain impulses (it is why athletes can finish a game injured).
What is Gate control theory of pain?
The weakest amount of a stimulus that a person can detect half the time.
What is an absolute threshold?
The difference between the images stimulating each eye used to perceive depth.
What is retinal disparity?
Grouping objects that are similar and close.
What is proximity?
Known as the chemical senses because their receptors are sensitive to chemical molecules.
What is the sense of smell and taste?
Taking information from the senses and organizing it into meaningful material.
What is perception?
Responding to changes in the environment because our senses have the ability to adapt to a constant level of stimulation.
What is sensory adaptation?
The innermost coating of the back of the eye, containing the light-sensitive receptor cells.
What is the retina?
The two binocular depth cues.
What is Convergence - the process by which your eyes turn inward to look? Retinal disparity - the differences between the images stimulating each eye?
What is the pathway of sound?
What is 1)the outer ear receives the sound 2) Pinna directs sound down the auditory canal 3)Vibrations occur in the canal and vibrate the eardrum 4)middle ear is filled with 3 tiny bones which vibrate and push against the cochlea- this bony tube contains fluids and neurons. 5)Pressure causes the liquied to move hairs that are attached to sensory cells that pick up the motion and turn into neuronal impulses. 6)The auditory nerve caries impulses to the brain (temporal lobe)
Occurs when a stimulus activates a receptor.
What is sensation?
Two types of processing stimuli (interaction between sensation and perception).
What is Bottom up and Top-Down processing?
The study of the relationships between sensory experiences and the physical stimuli that cause them
What is psychophysics?
Three monocular depth cues that 1) farther away the less detail 2) overlapping of images 3)parallel lines converge when stretched into the distance.
What are 1) aerial perspective 2) interposition 3) linear perspective?
How vision occurs.
What is 1)light enters the eye through the pupil and reaches the lens 2)the lens focuses the light on the retina 3) the retina contains the receptors, rods and cones, which turn the light energy into neuronal impulses 4) these impulses travel over the optic nerve to the brain where it is routed to the occipital lobe.
Brief auditory or visual messages that are presented below the absolute threshold.
What are subliminal messages?