Sensation Basics
What is the process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment?
Sensation
What is the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information called?
Perception
What is the smallest difference between two stimuli that can be detected 50% of the time?
Difference threshold (Just Noticeable Difference, JND)
The focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus is called what?
Selective attention
What does “Gestalt” mean in psychology?
An organized whole
Which sense is most closely linked to memory and emotion?
Smell (olfactory sense)
The tendency to see meaningful patterns (like faces in clouds) is known as what?
Pareidolia or perceptual organization
What is it called when we stop noticing a constant, unchanging stimulus?
Sensory adaptation
What experiment demonstrates how people miss obvious things when focusing on one task (like a gorilla in a basketball video)?
Invisible Gorilla / Inattentional blindness experiment
Which Gestalt principle makes us group similar objects together?
Similarity
The minimum stimulation needed to detect a stimulus 50% of the time is called what?
Absolute threshold
What do we call the ability to perceive depth and 3D despite a flat retina?
Depth perception
You are in a dim room and someone lights a candle. If you barely notice it, you’ve just detected your _____.
Absolute threshold
When texting while driving, what type of attention failure are you demonstrating?
Divided attention
When our brain fills in gaps to create a complete, whole object, it’s called what?
Closure
What term describes the conversion of stimulus energy (like light or sound) into neural signals?
Transduction
The study of how expectations and past experiences influence perception is known as what?
Perceptual set
The Weber’s Law states that the JND is a constant ____ of the original stimulus intensity.
Proportion
When you hear your name in a crowded room, it’s called the ____ effect.
Cocktail party effect
When objects are close together, we see them as part of the same group. Which principle is this?
Proximity
True or False: Sensation involves interpretation.
False — perception involves interpretation
When two people see the same image differently, which psychological concept is at work?
Subjective perception / perceptual interpretation
Give a real-life example of sensory adaptation.
stop noticing perfume, clothes on skin, hum of AC, etc.
True or False: Selective attention means we can fully focus on two tasks at once.
False — we can only focus on one consciously at a time.
A set of dots forming a smooth curve rather than jagged lines illustrates which principle?
Continuity