Sensation, Perception, and Historical Schools of Psychology

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering key sensory processing concepts, Gestalt principles, perceptual organizational phenomena, and historical schools of thought in psychology.

Sensation

The process by which we detect physical energy from our environment and encode it as neural signals, representing the outside world inside our heads.

Perception

The process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events.

Bottom-Up Processing

Analysis that begins with the sense receptors and feature detectors and works up to the brain's integration of sensory information.

Top-Down Processing

Information processing that is guided by our experience, beliefs, and expectations as well as incoming sensory data.

Prosopagnosia

A condition resulting from abnormalities or damage to the right fusiform gyrus—a fold across the temporal and occipital lobes that coordinates facial perception and memory.

Absolute Threshold

The minimum amount of stimulation needed to produce a sensory experience, operationally defined as the intensity detected accurately 1/2 the time over many trials.

Difference Threshold

Also called the "just noticeable difference", it is the smallest physical difference between two stimuli that a person can reliably detect 50% of the time.

Weber's Law

The principle that the just noticeable difference is always large when stimulus intensity is high and small when stimulus intensity is low.

Signal Detection Theory

A theory predicting how and when we detect the presence of a faint stimulus among background stimulation, depending on signal strength in combination with the receiver's psychological state.

Sensory Adaptation

Diminishing sensitivity to an unchanging stimulus.

Selective Attention

The focusing of conscious awareness, like a flashlight beam, on only a limited aspect of what we experience.

Cocktail Party Effect

A phenomenon illustrating selective attention, in which a person can attend to only one voice among many in a loud room.

Inattentional Blindness

Failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere.

Pop-Out Phenomenon

An attentional effect occurring when a strikingly distinct stimulus, such as the only smiling face in a crowd, draws our eye.

Visual Capture

The phenomenon in which vision usually dominates when there is a conflict between vision and other sensory inputs.

Gestalt

A German word meaning "form" or "whole", referring to the psychological approach that studies how human beings organize and integrate pieces of information into meaningful wholes.

Gestalt Principle of Proximity

The Gestalt organizational principle stating that stimuli that are physically close together get grouped together.

Gestalt Principle of Similarity

The Gestalt organizational principle stating that stimuli that look alike tend to be grouped together.

Gestalt Principle of Continuity

The Gestalt organizational principle stating that stimuli that tend to fall along a smooth curve or a straight line tend to be grouped together.

Gestalt Principle of Closure

The Gestalt organizational principle stating that we tend to fill in gaps in a figure that is incomplete to perceive a whole shape.

Depth Perception

Our ability to see objects in three dimensions although the images that strike the retina are two-dimensional, enabling us to judge distance.

Perceptual Constancy

The feature of perception that enables us to perceive an object as unchanging despite a changing sensory stimulus, including shape, size, and lightness constancy.

Perceptual Set

A mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another, heavily influenced by context, schemas, and expectations.

Parapsychology

The study of paranormal phenomena, including extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis.

Unconscious

The place where mental processes operate below the level of conscious awareness.

Psychoanalysis

A method developed by Sigmund Freud that attempts to bring the contents of the unconscious into conscious awareness so that conflicts can be revealed and constructively addressed.

Structuralism

An early school of psychology associated with Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener aimed at identifying the basic parts, or structures, of the conscious mind.

Functionalism

An early school of psychology associated with William James and Charles Darwin aimed at describing how the conscious mind aids adaptation to an environment.

Behaviorism

A school of psychology associated with John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner aimed at describing behavior in response to environmental stimuli.

Humanistic Psychology

A school of psychology associated with Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers focusing on how people become happier and more fulfilled, emphasizing the basic goodness of people.

Cognitivism

A school of psychology associated with George Miller and Ulric Neisser aimed at exploring internal mental processes that influence behavior.