PSYC 101 Ch. 4

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### General Psychology Concepts

Flashcard 1

Front: Prosopagnosia (Face Blindness)

Back: Inability to detect and identify faces, despite normal object detection. Some may detect individual features but cannot integrate them.

Flashcard 2

Front: Stimulus

Back: Anything that can trigger a physical or behavioral change, such as light, sound, or a spider crawling on the skin.

Flashcard 3

Front: Sensation

Back: Simple stimulation of a sense organ, such as light, sound, pressure, odor, and taste.

Flashcard 4

Front: Perception

Back: Organizing, identifying, and interpreting sensory information to recognize meaningful objects and events.

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### Sensation and Perception Processes

Flashcard 5

Front: Bottom-Up Processing

Back: Analysis that begins with sensory receptors and works up to the brain's integration of sensory information.

Flashcard 6

Front: Top-Down Processing

Back: Information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, like experience and expectations, that shape perception.

Flashcard 7

Front: Sensory Adaptation

Back: Diminished sensitivity to constant stimulation, increasing focus by reducing background "chatter."

Flashcard 8

Front: Psychophysics

Back: Methods that systematically relate the physical characteristics of a stimulus to an observer's perception.

Flashcard 9

Front: Signal Detection Theory (SDT)

Back: Predicts how and when we detect faint stimuli amid background noise, influenced by sensitivity and decision criteria.

Flashcard 10

Front: Absolute Threshold

Back: The minimum stimulation needed to detect a stimulus 50% of the time.

Flashcard 11

Front: Difference Threshold (Just Noticeable Difference)

Back: The minimum difference a person can detect between two stimuli 50% of the time.

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### Vision System

Flashcard 12

Front: Wavelength

Back: The distance from the peak of one light or sound wave to the peak of the next, perceived as hue.

Flashcard 13

Front: Amplitude

Back: The amount of energy in a light or sound wave, perceived as brightness.

Flashcard 14

Front: Purity

Back: The degree to which a light source emits one vs. a mixture of wavelengths, affecting color saturation.

Flashcard 15

Front: Rods

Back: Retinal receptors that detect black, white, and gray, sensitive to movement, and necessary for peripheral and twilight vision.

Flashcard 16

Front: Cones

Back: Retinal receptors that detect fine detail and color, primarily functioning in daylight.

Flashcard 17

Front: Photoreceptor Layer

Back: The layer in the retina containing rods and cones that capture light and transduce it into neural signals.

Flashcard 18

Front: Trichromatic Theory

Back: Suggests that color perception results from three types of cones (red, green, blue) responding to different wavelengths of light.

Flashcard 19

Front: Opponent-Process Theory

Back: Suggests that color perception is controlled by the opposing activity of three pairs of color receptors: red-green, blue-yellow, black-white.

Flashcard 20

Front: Feature Detection (V1)

Back: Nerve cells in the brain respond to specific features like edges, orientation, and movement of stimuli.

Flashcard 21

Front: Parallel Processing

Back: The brain processes motion, form, depth, and color in different areas simultaneously.

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### Auditory System

Flashcard 22

Front: Sound Waves

Back: Bands of compressed and expanded air that are processed by the ears and transduced into neural signals.

Flashcard 23

Front: Frequency

Back: The number of complete wavelengths that pass a point in a given time, affecting pitch (high or low).

Flashcard 24

Front: Intensity

Back: The loudness of sound, measured in decibels (dB).

Flashcard 25

Front: Timbre

Back: The quality of sound that distinguishes it from other sounds with the same pitch and volume.

Flashcard 26

Front: Tonotopic Organization

Back: Different parts of the cochlea respond to different frequencies of sound.

Flashcard 27

Front: Pitch Perception - Place Code

Back: Where in the basilar membrane activity is highest, corresponding to frequency.

Flashcard 28

Front: Pitch Perception - Temporal Code

Back: The timing of sound waves synchronized with hair cell receptors, triggering action potentials to provide pitch information.

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### Pain and Touch

Flashcard 29

Front: Nociceptors

Back: Sensory receptors that respond to potentially damaging stimuli, sending pain signals to the spinal cord.

Flashcard 30

Front: Gate Control Theory

Back: Theory suggesting that pain is regulated by "gates" in the spinal cord that can be influenced by other sensory information, like touch.

Flashcard 31

Front: Dual Pathways of Pain

Back: Sensory pathway (location of pain) and emotional pathway (how we feel about the pain).

Flashcard 32

Front: Proprioception

Back: The sense of bodily position, relating tactile sensations to location and movement.

Flashcard 33

Front: Vestibular Sense

Back: The sense of balance, detected in the inner ear's semicircular canals.

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### Multimodal Sensory Phenomena

Flashcard 34

Front: Synesthesia

Back: A condition where one sensory stimulus leads to a conscious processing of another stimulus, like seeing colors when hearing sounds.

Flashcard 35

Front: Sensory Interaction

Back: The phenomenon where different sensory systems influence each other.

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### Memory and Sensory Systems

Flashcard 36

Front: Taste

Back: A chemical sense with receptors for sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami sensations.

Flashcard 37

Front: Olfaction

Back: The sense of smell, a chemical sense processed by the olfactory system, bypassing the thalamus.

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### Gestalt Principles

Flashcard 38

Front: Figure-Ground

Back: The organization of the visual field into objects that stand out from their background.

Flashcard 39

Front: Grouping

Back: The perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into meaningful groups, based on principles like proximity, continuity, and similarity.

Flashcard 40

Front: Depth Perception

Back: The ability to judge the distance of objects, using monocular and binocular cues.

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### Perception Phenomena

Flashcard 41

Front: Motion Perception - Phi Phenomenon

Back: An illusion of movement created when adjacent lights blink on and off in quick succession.

Flashcard 42

Front: Perceptual Constancies

Back: The tendency to perceive objects as unchanging, despite changes in illumination or retinal images.

Flashcard 43

Front: Inattentional Blindness

Back: Failure to notice something unexpected due to focused attention elsewhere.

Flashcard 44

Front: Change Blindness

Back: Failure to detect changes between what is present now and what was present a moment ago.

Flashcard 45

Front: Attentional Blink

Back: The phenomenon where one becomes "blind" to stimuli after identifying a previous one.

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### Additional Terms

Flashcard 46

Front: Subliminal Perception

Back: The processing of stimuli below the threshold of conscious awareness.

Flashcard 47

Front: Absolute Threshold

Back: The minimum amount of stimulation needed to detect a stimulus 50% of the time.

Flashcard 48

Front: Difference Threshold

Back: The minimum difference a person can detect between two stimuli 50% of the time.

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