Sensation & Percpetion

Terms and Definitions

Body Position and Movement

1. Kinesthesis/Kinesthesia (Proprioception): The system for sensing the position and movement of individual body parts.

2. Vestibular Sense: The sense of body movement and position, including balance; relies on semicircular canals to determine head position in space.

Sensory Interaction

3. Sensory Interaction: The principle that one sense may influence another, as when the smell of food enhances its taste.

4. McGurk Effect: A phenomenon where visual and auditory information interact, altering perception (e.g., seeing lips form one sound while hearing another changes what is heard).

5. Embodied Cognition: The influence of bodily sensations, gestures, and other physical states on cognitive judgments and preferences.

6. Synesthesia: A condition where stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in another (e.g., “hearing” colors).

7. Tritone Paradox: An auditory illusion where high and low frequency sounds are heard ambiguously, and the brain chooses which frequency to perceive.

Visual Organization

8. Gestalt: A psychological concept emphasizing the tendency to integrate pieces of information into meaningful wholes.

9. Figure-Ground: Organizing the visual field into objects (figures) that stand out against a background (ground).

10. Grouping: The tendency to organize stimuli into coherent groups.

• Proximity: Grouping nearby objects together.

• Continuity: Perceiving smooth, continuous patterns instead of disjointed ones.

• Closure: Filling in gaps to perceive a complete object.

• Similarity: Grouping objects with similar characteristics.

• Simplicity: Organizing information into the simplest structure possible.

• Common Fate: Perceiving objects moving together as part of a group.

• Symmetry: Viewing symmetrical elements as part of a unified whole.

Cognition

11. Bottom-Up Processing: Perception that starts with raw sensory input, building up to a complete understanding.

12. Top-Down Processing: Perception influenced