Psych 120 Final

What’s sensation to perception? (Definition & Equation)

Definition: experience the world through our senses

Equation: stimulus> sensory receptors> neural impulses> perception

What’s transduction?

A conversion from a physical signal to a neural signal (carried out by sensory receptors)

What’s the cornea?

Outer part of the eye that starts to focus the image and does the initial focusing, protects our eyes, a clear outer covering

What’s the pupil?

Controls the amount of light that gets into the eye

What’s the iris?

Surrounds the pupil, coloured part of your eye

What’s the lens?

Focuses a sharp image onto the back of the eye, can bend light so you can focus on an image

What’s the retina?

Curved projection screen, thin layers of cells, contains receptors for light (rods, cones)

What’s the blind spot?

A gap at the back of the eye where the visual signals leave the eye and travel toward the back of the brain so we can perceive what we’re seeing

What’s the fovea?

Part of the retina that’s directly behind the centre of your field of view, represents central part of visual field

What are the two problems of focus and describe them

1. Myopia: can see things close up, far away is less clear (nearsightedness)

2. Hyperopia: can’t see things close up, far away is clear

What does the retina do?

Takes light energy and turns it into neural signal and sends it to the brain to optic nerve

In the retina, what are the two types of cells and describe them.

1. Bipolar cells: processes signals from rods and cones and sends it to ganglion cells

2. Ganglion cells: allows signal to leave the eye

What does the distribution of rods and cones show?

Shows the range of the back of the eye (fovea)

What are rods?

Light sensitive (function more in dim conditions) and sensitive to motion

What are cones?

Not dense (function in normal lighting conditions) and allow you to see colour

What’s the visual pathway?

• Part of signals from each eye crossover (optic chiasm)

• Once signals pass optic chiasm, they travel to thalamus and make connections with cells in a special area of the thalamus that’s devoted to processing visual signals

• From the thalamus, signals travel to the back of the brain where they’re processed in the visual cortex which is located in the occipital lobe

• Visual cortex processes the visual image

What’s the electromagnetic spectrum?

• measured in wavelengths (nanometers)

• uv rays, x-rays, microwave, infra-red, radio waves

• short end: 400 nm

• long end: 770 nm

Seeing Color.

• physical energy in the environment does not have perceptual qualities

• light waves aren’t “colored” but wavelength determines the perception of color

• low: blue

• medium: green and yellow

• high: orange and red

Color Reflectance.

• color being reflected off of objects is wavelength being reflected

• example: bananas aren’t ripe yet and are colored green, chemical qualities of the banana are absorbing all the different wavelengths of light and only allowing the medium wavelengths of light to be reflected

• example: chameleon can change the color of its skin, pigment in skin decides what to absorb and portray

Color Warning Signals.

• an effective way to communicate

• rare for an animal not to see in color

• not complex for animal to see color, just needs cones

What’s trichromatic vision?

There are 3 different types of cones in our retina:

1. Long: red

2. Medium: green

3. Short: blue

What’s Dichromatism: Red-Green Color Deficiency?

• trichromat: have all 3 cones (97% of the population)

• dichromat: only have 2 cones (lacks the long (red) cone)

What’s the opponent process?

• opposing color channels processed by opponent neurons in visual cortex which

• red with green

• blue with yellow

• black with white

What’s color vision?

• ration of cone activity received and processed by opponent neurons

• pattern of opponent neuron responses reveals the precise wavelength of light that produced it

What are the 2 approaches of complex visual perception?

1. Perception results from the sum of “ sensations”

2. Gestalt approach, perception starts from the whole

What are the illusory contours?

• give an image and ask for a report

• seeing things that aren’t really there

What are the 4 gestalt principles?

1. Simplicity: when a person looks at an image they make the simplest interpretation

2. Similarity: if they look similar we tend to group them together

3. Continuity: if something’s blocking an object we mentally continue it

4. Proximity: when objects are close to eachother, then those objects belong together

What is figure-group segregation? (Gestalt principle)

When we look at an image we try to extract the object of the image from the background ( we cant easily do this), example: the elderly woman vs young woman

What are the 4 ways to perceive depth?

1. Binocular depth cues: results from binocular disparity which is when the image that enters the left eye is different from the right, perceives depth from a 3D image

2. Visual cliff experiment

3. Monocular depth cues: doesn’t require the interaction between both eyes, used to perceive depth from a 2D image

4. Relative height: on the ground the higher it is the further it is, in the sky the higher it is the closer it is

What are illusions of size constancy?

• Rely on contextual depth cues to achieve deceptions

• The Ames Room: other visual illusions rely on restricted viewing angle and manipulation of depth cues

What’s sound?

• travels in waves

• frequency: number of wave cycles per second (measured in hertz)

• amplitude: intensity/ volume

• low frequency: low pitched, high frequency: high pitched

• low amplitude: soft sound, high amplitude: loud sound

What are the 3 parts of hearing and describe them.

1. Outer part of ear: pinna, external auditory canal, tympanic membrane

2. Middle ear: ossicles (smallest bone in body), malleus (attached to tympanic membrane), incus, stapes (transmits sound wave to cochlea)

3. Inner ear: cochlea, vibration of tympanic membrane causes ossicles to vibrate and transmit sound waves to cochlea

Cochlea: Basilar Membrane

• high frequency: tuned to the base

• low frequency: tuned to the tip

• tuned to different frequencies

What’s the perception of sound?

• for a sound to be perceived it must travel to the brain

• the auditory nerve carries the neural signals first to the thalamus and then to the primary auditory cortex which processes your perception of sound

What are the 2 types of hearing problems?

1. Conductive: a disruption of the sound signal in the ear, sound signals not being transmitted properly to cochlea, considered less serious, can be treated

2. Sensorineural: more serious, can be caused by actual damage, neural signals not going to the brain so can’t hear, limited hearing or deaf

What’s a cochlear implant?

• transmits neural signals that are no longer being transmitted on their own

• can’t provide fully functioning hearing, can provide limited form of hearing

• allows a person to hear their own voice when speaking

What is taste?

• chemical contents of food react with taste receptors located in our mouths

• taste buds not visible

• sweet and salty: we like them

• sour and bitter: grow to like

• umami: savoury or meaty

What are the 2 types of taste sensitivity?

1. Supertaster: more taste buds, sensitive to bitter and spicy, picky eater

2. Non-taster: fewer taste buds, likely to tolerate spicy food

What’s olfaction?

• olfactory receptors: in the lining of your nose

• olfactory bulb: strip on the brain

What’s the pleasantness of odors?

• signals travel to orbitofrontal cortex which is part of the frontal lobe and is a decision making part of the brain, an area where we decide if the door is or isn’t pleasant

• amygdala processes the emotional content of a particular experience, allows us to have an emotional reaction to the smell (positive or negative)

Perceiving touch

• mechanoreceptors receptive to temperature and pressure changes against skin

• cranial and spinal nerves carry signal to the brain

What is pain?

• nociceptors: fast fiberpain (for very sharp and immediate pain), slow fiber pain (more lingering pain, slow, ache)

Perceiving Pain: Gate Control Model

• pain signals travel to the brain via the spinal cord

• additional signals influence pain signals

• can act to open or close a “gate”

• open gate: feel pain

• close gate: less or no pain

• placebo effect: expecting treatment to work= feel less pain

• when focusing on other things you no longer feel the pain

• no explanation for why these things should work but for some reason it does work for some people to relive pain: medication, acupuncture, hypnosis

What’s the attentional system?

Allows us to filter out sensory experiences that aren’t important and allows us to only focus on the most important ones

What’s the filter theory?

Donald Broadbent who suggested that the filter only allows certain information through for further processing, aware of the physical qualities, not aware of anything meaningful (if they got through it would be overwhelming)

What’s the cocktail party effect?

Everyone in different groups having their own group conversations and you’re engaging in one of the conversations and listening to what the other people are saying and from nearby in another conversation that you’re not actually attending to you hear your name said (according to filter theory this shouldn’t happen because anything meaningful should be blocked and you shouldn’t be able to detect it)

What’s the attenuation theory?

Ann Treisman who suggested this theory which is a variation of the filter theory, she believes meaningful aspects aren’t blocked but they’re weakened

What’s subliminal advertising?

We can be focusing on something and hidden messages are allowed to exist and get through our attentional system and effect our emotions and thoughts and change our behaviour and we dont even know they’re doing it

What’s implicit priming?

• view a list of words with no explicit instruction to remember the words

• later given a word-stem completion task

What’s inattentional blindness?

We attend to what we expect to see, unexpected events go unnoticed

What’s divided attention?

• the effect of talking and driving ability

• shows impairment when people are talking on the phone when driving

• reading while listening to music, both contain language

What’s cerebral lateralization?

2 hemispheres of the brain, the left hemisphere is the language production and language comprehension

What’s the split-brain surgery?

• involves the complete severing of the corpus callosum

• relieves people with epilepsy

• seperates the left hemisphere from the right hemisphere

What’s spatial neglect?

Nothing is wrong with eyes but you forget everything on the left side, can’t see it, its ignored

What are the ventral and dorsal pathways?

• ventral: travels to temporal lobe, allows us to identify whatever were seeing, the WHAT pathway, visually estimating

• dorsal: WHERE/ HOW pathway, coordinated fashion, illusion doesnt have an impact, can engage in motor tasks

What/s consciousness?

All conscious experiences are associated with brain activity, variations in consciousness occur naturally or they can be manipulated

What’s the global workplace model?

• multiple areas of the brain allow for full conscious awareness

• frontal love allows us to plan and think and initiate any kind of motor movement

• parietal lobe allows us to be aware of the space around us

• occipital lobe allows us to process visual signals coming in our eyes

• temporal lobe allows us to hear what’s going on around us and process la gauge, allows us to form long term memories

What are the 2 altered states of consciousness?

1. Arousal: a person is awake

2. Awareness: how aware is a person of the things going on around them

What’s unresponsive wakefulness syndrome?

• Terri Schiavo

• Results from extensive brain damage

• Full arousal but no conscious awareness

• Known as persistent vegetative state

What’s locked-in syndrome?

• Full conscious awareness, just can’t move

• Compared to being buried alive

• The diving bell and the butterfly book

• Brain activity compared to healthy, still substantial amount of activity

What are the 3 altered states of consciousness?

1. Hypnosis: a state between sleep and wakefulness in which a person becomes highly suggestable

2. Concentrative Meditation: a person getting into a very relaxed state and focusing their attention on one thing, shuts out everything else

3. Mindfulness: a person lets their thoughts flow freely, think about many different things and pay attention to them but don’t react to them

What are the 2 theories about hypnosis?

1. Neodissociation Theory: person doesn’t do or say things out of character, legitimate state of consciousness that a person can be induced to enter

2. Sociocognitive Theory: fancy way of saying hypnosis is not real, a person in this state is actually fully aware and conscious of what’s going on but behaving in a way they think a hypnotized person should

What’s circadian rhythm?

• A portion of visual signals from the eyes travel to the hypothalamus

• Allows light to influence the rhythmic activity of the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN)

• Signals from SCN project to the pineal gland to influence production of the hormone melatonin (sleep hormone)

What are the 3 ways to measure sleep?

1. EEG: measures brain wave pattern

2. EMG: measures muscle movement

3. EOG: measures eye movement

The stages of sleep

• Effect of depriving people of REM sleep

• REM Rebound: if you’re deprived of REM sleep you’ll get it back eventually

Brain activity during REM sleep

• Dreams we have during REM sleep tend to be more vivid

• Brain regions linked to motivation, emotion and vision are highly active

• Inhibitions of prefrontal cortex so you don’t question what’s occurring

• Atonia is when body is paralyzed during REM sleep

What are the 4 disorders of sleep?

1. Sleepwalking: get up and walk around with very little conscious awareness

2. Night terror: terrifying dreams that young children may have, occur in childhood then people generally grow out of them

3. Insomnia: onset (inability to get to sleep), maintenance (you get to sleep ok but can’t stay asleep), terminal (wake up in the middle of the night then can’t get back to sleep)

4. Narcolepsy: person falls asleep at inappropriate times, on the spot (cateplexy: loss of muscle control (collapse), orexin: neurons in hypothalamus)

What’s the neural basis of waking up?

The Reticular Activating System (RAS): is a mixture of nuclei and fibers in the brainstem that sends signals to your brain to tell you it’s time to be consciously awake, sends signals to spinal cord to tell you to move your body, releases you from state of atonia

Drugs and consciousness

Drugs alter conscious awareness through their effects on neurotransmitters

Anti anxiety and sedatives

• Engage GABA receptors (slow things down, inhibitory)

• Benzodiazepines: minor tranquilizers, anti-anxiety (calm a person)

• Barbiturates and Alcohol: produce sedation and can induce sleep (relax)

Stimulant: MDMA

MDMA (Ecstasy): slow to act but long lasting (4 hrs), sense of euphoria and heightened awareness, acts on serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine

Opioid Analgesics

• All opioids are potently addictive since effects often very pleasurable

• Natural source of opioids, derived from seeds of opium poppies, used for thousands of years

• Morphine: synthesized from the active ingredient found in opium in early 1800s, named after “Morpheus” the Greek god of dreams

• Heroin: first synthesized from morphine in late 1800s, used as cough reliever, very potent pain reliever but highly addictive, respiratory failure

• Fentanyl: analgesic potency about 80 times that of morphine

Hallucinogens

• Alter sensory perception and produce vivid hallucinations (LSD)

• LSD first discovered by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann who tested it on himself and his colleagues in 1943

• Experiences vary greatly between users (from euphoric to frightening), addiction rates and neurotoxicity (misconceptions)

What are the 3 types of memory?

1. Sensory Memory: the information coming into your senses, unattended information is lost (in about 2-3 seconds)

2. Short-Term Memory: unrehearsed information is lost, holding area for memory, engage in maintenance rehearsal which is repeating something over and over to yourself keeping it alive until you can write it down

3. Long-Term Memory: information can be retrieved later, can stay for indefinite duration, some information may be lost over time

What are the 2 serial position effects?

1. Primary Effect: words said at the beginning are more likely to be remembered because you’re repeating them to try and remember

2. Recency Effect: words said most recent are fresh and easier remembered (effect of delaying recall doesn’t affect primary, only recency)

What are the 2 divisions of long-term memory?

1. Explicit Memory: requires conscious effort and often can be verbally described

2. Implicitly Memory: doesn’t required conscious effort and often cannot be verbally described

What are the 2 types of memory under the explicit memory category?

1. Episodic Memory: personally experienced events

2. Semantic Memory: facts and knowledge

What are the 2 types of conditioning under the implicit memory category

1. Classical Conditioning: associating 2 stimuli elicits a response

2. Procedural Memory: motor skills and habits

Depth of processing

• Shallow processing vs deep processing

• Deeper processing makes the information more meaningful

• Results in a stronger memory trace in LTM for later retrieval

What are the 4 types of instructions?

1. Explicit Learning (learn the word)

2. Implicit Learning (does it contain an “e”? Yes or no)

3. Implicit Learning (count the letters)

4. Implicit Learning (how pleasant)

• people do better at explicit learning but best as implicit learning (how pleasant) because they have to process the word much deeper

What are the 2 methods of the generation effect?

Method 1: presented with a word combination with instruction to remember second word for later

Method 2: instruction to generate a second word that is related to the first

Production Effect and Enactment Effect

Production: actually saying the words, takes effort, process it deeper

Enactment: explaining the information to someone else helps you remember

Testing effect

Studying on its own vs studying and then testing, test yourself and get someone else to test you which helps you retain information longer

Meta memory

A persons knowledge and self-awareness of their memory, judgements of learning

• Labor Vain Effect: complicated material, try to keep plotting through

• Proximal Learning: learn info in chunks rather than all at once

Superior Memorizers

• Mnemonic strategies often combine visual imagery with spatial memory

• Used by “superior memorizers” to remember long lists of items

What are the 4 types of problems of memory?

1. Blocking (tip-of-the-tongue): often occurs because of interference from words that are similar in sound or meaning, a problem of retrieval

2. Interference (proactive and retroactive): proactive (trying to remember new information but old information is interfering), retroactive (trying to remember old information but new information is interfering)

3. Absentmindedness: often results from poor attention during encoding, routine everyday activities, you didn’t store the information properly

4. Prospective Memory: lacks specific retrieval cues, something you have to do in the future

Flashbulb Memories

• Special kind of long-term memory that stand out

• Represent an important event or incident that occurred in a person’s life

• Unusual or unique experiences

• Explained by the Van Restorff Effect: any event/ experience that stands out from the rest becomes more memorable

• Exist like snapshots

Context dependent memory

Retrieval of a memory can be aided if a person finds themselves in the same context in which the original memory was encoded

Category clustering

People presented with words that can be divided into meaningful categories

Wording of questions affects memory (Loftus and Palmer)

• Students watch driver ed film that depicts a car accident

• Provided with questionnaire after

What are the 4 types of error in memory?

1. Misinformation: a person hears information after the fact and this information can affect their true memory for the event, alters original memory

2. Reality Monitoring: kinds of memories for daily routine that on their own aren’t memorable, did I really do it or just imagine it

3. Source Monitoring: can’t figure out where you got the information from

4. Destination: when a person forgets who they told the information to

Memory Consodilation and Reconsolidation

Consodilation: the storage of memory (long-term), available for retrieval

Reconsolidation: strengthen memory trace, easier chance at retrieval, can alter/ change the memory or have errors

Creating the Long-Term Memory Trace

• Establishing a long-term memory trace requires conscious effort

• With effort, a memory trace becomes stronger and retrieving gets easier

Neural Networks

• Connections laid down in short-term memory establish retrieval paths in LTM

• Parts of the network can remain stable while other parts can decay

Case of Henry Molaison (“H.M.”)

• Surgery in 1953 (age 27)

• Suffered from seizures

• Hippocampus was removed to stop seizures

• Resulted in memory loss

• Anterograde amnesia: couldn’t form long term memories

• Graded retrograde amnesia: could recall earlier memories better than the ones closer to his surgery

• He was given a mirror drawing task which was a rest of procedural memory

• Given multiple training sessions

• When he first performed the drawing task he made lots of errors

• The next day he doesn’t remember doing the task but when he does it again the muscle memory form practice yesterday is still there

Case of Clive Wearing

• Damage to hippocampus

• Anterograde amnesia: same as H.M., couldn’t form long term memories

• Retrograde amnesia: complete erasure of memories from the past

Role of Hippocampus in Long-Term Memory

• Hippocampus is not a part of the brain where memories are stored

• Indicates it’s a structure of the brains that’s critical for transferring STM to LTM

Where are memories stored?

All over, distributed networks all over the brain.

Francis Galton, Alfred Binet and Intelligence

• Francis Galton believe intelligence was genetic (anthropometric and family trees)

• Alfred Binet: goal was to identify the students who performed well below the norm, special education, believed intelligence was the ability to think, understand, reason and adapt to changes

Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test

• Mental age compared to others in same age group across the population

• Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

• Standardized (can be used anywhere)