Sensation: It's the raw data our senses collect, such as seeing a red apple or feeling the warmth of the sun on your skin.

Perception: This is how our brain interprets and organizes the sensory information, so when you see the apple, you recognize it as fruit and not a tomato.

Bottom-up processing: Think of it as building from the ground up. You start with the basic sensory input and then build up to more complex perceptions. For example, you see individual letters, then words, then sentences.

Top-down processing: This is like having a blueprint or expectations guiding your perception. You might see a vague shape in the distance and interpret it as a person based on past experiences.

Selective attention: It's like focusing a spotlight on one thing while everything else is in the shadows. You might focus on a conversation at a noisy party while tuning out other conversations.

Inattentional blindness: This happens when you're so focused on one thing that you completely miss something else in plain sight, like not noticing a gorilla walking through a basketball game.

Change blindness: It's when you don't notice changes in your environment because your attention is elsewhere. For example, not noticing someone changed a small detail in a room you're familiar with.

Transduction: This is the transformation of sensory stimuli into neural signals that your brain can understand, like converting light waves into signals your brain interprets as vision.

Psychophysics: It's about studying the relationship between physical stimuli (like light and sound) and our psychological experiences of them (like how bright or loud something seems).

Parapsychology: This field explores phenomena that are outside the realm of normal scientific understanding, like telepathy or clairvoyance.

Absolute threshold: This is the minimum amount of stimulation needed for you to detect a stimulus, like the faintest sound you can hear or the dimmest light you can see.

Difference threshold: It's the smallest amount of change in a stimulus that you can detect, like noticing the difference in weight when someone adds a spoonful of sugar to your coffee.

Subliminal: These are stimuli that are below your conscious awareness but might still influence your thoughts or behaviors, like hidden messages in advertisements.

Sensory adaptation: This is when your sensory receptors become less sensitive to constant, unchanging stimuli, like not noticing the smell of your own house.

Signal Detection Theory: It's a way to understand how we make decisions about detecting faint, uncertain stimuli against a background of noise, like deciding whether a faint light in the distance is a star or a plane.

Weber's Law: This law states that the difference threshold for a stimulus is proportional to the magnitude of the stimulus. In simpler terms, it means that the bigger the stimulus, the bigger the change needs to be for you to notice it.

Perceptual set: Your perceptual set is like a mental filter that influences what you perceive. For example, if you're expecting to see a cat, you might misinterpret a shadow as a cat in the dark.

Priming: It's like preparing your brain to interpret information in a certain way based on previous experiences or exposure to related stimuli, like hearing the word "yellow" and then noticing yellow things more easily.

Schema: This is a mental framework or concept that helps organize and interpret information, like having a schema for what a typical classroom looks like.

Extrasensory perception (ESP): This refers to the ability to perceive information without using the known physical senses, like seeing things in a dream that later come true.

Wavelength, hue, intensity: Wavelength is the distance between peaks of waves, hue is the color we perceive based on wavelength, and intensity is the brightness or amplitude of the wave.

Iris, lens, retina: The iris controls the size of the pupil to regulate the amount of light entering the eye, the lens focuses light onto the retina, and the retina contains cells that convert light into neural signals.

Accommodation: It's the process by which the lens of the eye changes shape to focus on objects at different distances, like adjusting a camera lens to focus on something close or far away.

Rods and Cones: Rods are sensitive to low light and help with night vision, while cones are responsible for color vision and detail in bright light.

Optic nerve, blind spot, fovea: The optic nerve carries visual information from the retina to the brain, the blind spot is where the optic nerve exits the eye and lacks photoreceptors, and the fovea is the central area of the retina with the highest concentration of cones for detailed vision.

Feature detectors and parallel processing: Feature detectors are neurons that respond to specific features of a stimulus, like edges or motion, and parallel processing is the brain's ability to simultaneously process multiple aspects of a stimulus, like color, shape, and movement.

Young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory: This theory suggests that there are three types of cones in the retina, each sensitive to different wavelengths of light corresponding to red, green, and blue, and all other colors are combinations of these.

Opponent-process theory: This theory suggests that we perceive color in terms of opposing pairs, like red-green or blue-yellow, and activation of one color in the pair inhibits the other.