Sensation and Perception

Here are flashcards with important information, biological organs, concepts, and people from the provided text:

Flashcard 1

• Front: What is the role of our senses?

• Back: To take in the world by converting stimuli or sensory information into electrical signals processed by the brain.

Flashcard 2

• Front: What is the absolute threshold of a sensation?

• Back: The minimum stimulation needed to register a particular stimulus 50% of the time.

Flashcard 3

• Front: Examples of absolute threshold.

• Back:

  • Seeing a candle from 30 miles on a dark clear night

  • Hearing the tick of a watch at 20 feet under quiet conditions

Flashcard 4

• Front: What is the signal detection theory model?

• Back: A model for predicting how and when a person will detect a weak stimulus, partly based on context. Detection of signals is affected by psychological state, alertness, and expectations.

Flashcard 5

• Front: What is the difference threshold?

• Back: The point at which one can tell the difference between two stimuli.

Flashcard 6

• Front: What is Weber's Law?

  • Back: We perceive differences on a logarithmic rather than linear scale (It's the percent of change that matters).

Flashcard 7

• Front: What is transduction?

• Back: The process of transforming energy from light into neural messages.

Flashcard 8

• Front: What determines the hue (color or shade) that we see?

• Back: The light waves' length and frequency.

Flashcard 9

• Front: What determines brightness or value?

• Back: The wave's amplitude.

Flashcard 10

• Front: What determines saturation or richness of color?

• Back: The number of distinct wavelengths that make up the light.

Flashcard 11

• Front: How do short waves with high frequency appear to our eyes?

• Back: As bluish colors.

Flashcard 12

• Front: How do long, low frequency wavelengths appear to our eyes?

• Back: As reddish hues.

Flashcard 13

• Front: What part of the eye focuses light waves onto the retina?

• Back: The lens.

Flashcard 14

• Front: What is the Chromostereoptic effect?

• Back: Pure colors located at the same distance from the eye appear to be at different distances (e.g., reds appear closer, blues more distant).

Flashcard 14. B

• Front: What is the name of a color from a single wavelength?

• Back: Pure spectral color (called fully saturated)

Flashcard 15

• Front: How is visual information encoded?

• Back: As separate neural impulses from tiny portions of the world, so the brain can reconstruct fine visual differences.

Flashcard 16

• Front: What are the two types of photoreceptor cells in the retina?

• Back: Rods and cones.

Flashcard 17

• Front: What is the function of rods?

• Back: Give us sensitivity under dim lighting conditions and allow us to see at night.

Flashcard 18

• Front: What is the function of cones?

• Back: Allow us to see fine details in bright light and give us the sensation of color.

Flashcard 19

• Front: Where are cones most tightly packed?

• Back: Around the fovea, the central region of the retina.

Flashcard 20

• Front: Where are rods primarily located?

• Back: In the periphery, the region surrounding the fovea.

Flashcard 21

• Front: What is the role of bipolar cells?

• Back: To turn on the neighboring ganglion cells.

Flashcard 22

• Front: What do the long axon tails of ganglion cells form?

• Back: The optic nerve (which carries neural impulses from the eye to the brain).

Flashcard 22.B

• Front: How does information travel from eye to the brain?

• Back: The information slips through the optic nerve, the Thalamus, and finally the visual cortex.

Flashcard 23

• Front: Where is the visual cortex located?

• Back: At the back of the brain in the occipital lobe.

Flashcard 24

• Front: What is the visual cortex responsible for?

• Back: The right cortex processes input from the left eye, and the left cortex processes input from the right eye.

Flashcard 25

• Front: What does the nervous system analyze as photo receptors capture light?

• Back: Differences in light (This Information gets transmitted to the brain).

Flashcard 26

• Front: How do we see objects?

• Back: By edge detection, where an edge can be created by a difference in color, brightness, or both.

Flashcard 27

• Front: What are feature detectors?

• Back: Specialized nerve cells in the visual cortex that respond to specific features like shape, angles, movements, and faces.

Flashcard 28

• Front: What is parallel processing?

• Back: The ability to process and analyze many separate aspects of a situation at once. (For visual processing this means making sense of form, depth, motion, and color.)

Flashcard 29

• Front: How does the brain use shadows?

• Back: To make decisions about what it's seeing and determine how objects are positioned in space.

Flashcard 30

• Front: What is Retinal disparity?

• Back: When viewing an object or scene, our left eye and right eye view slightly different images, providing information about distance.

Flashcard 30 B

• Front: What is Depth Perception?

• Back: Allows us to estimate distances between objects and ourselves.

Flashcard 31

• Front: What are monocular cues?

• Back: Depth perception cues that don't require both eyes. Examples include occlusion, relative size, relative height, texture gradient, familiar size, linear perspective, aerial perspective, and relative brightness.

Flashcard 32

• Front: What is occlusion?

• Back: The idea that an object that blocks the view of another object must be in front of it.

Flashcard 33

• Front: What is texture gradient?

• Back: As a texture gets further away, it forms smaller visual angles or pictures on the retina and is less noticeable.

Flashcard 33 B

• Front: What is Familiar Size?

• Back: Knowledge of the normal size of certain objects can provides cues to depth.

Flashcard 34

• Front: What is linear perspective?

• Back: The idea that parallel lines seem to converge as they move into the distance.

Flashcard 35

• Front: What is aerial perspective?

• Back: Objects that are further away appear to be hazier and bluer.

Flashcard 36

• Front: What is perception?

• Back: Organizational principles that explain how we tend to group things together.

Flashcard 37

• Front: What is the principle of similarity?

• Back: We group together figures that resemble each other.

Flashcard 38

• Front: What is the principle of proximity?

• Back: The closer figures are to each other, the more we tend to group them together perceptually.

Flashcard 39

• Front: What is the principle of good continuation?

• Back: A preference for organizing form in a way where contours continue smoothly along their original course.

Flashcard 40

• Front: What is the principle of closure?

• Back: We impose completeness on small amounts of input.

Flashcard 41

• Front: What is Pareidolia?

• Back: The tendency to organize incomplete and even random images into meaningful images.

Flashcard 42

• Front: What is nativism?

• Back: The view that perception of the world is a set of innate abilities.

Flashcard 43

• Front: What is empiricism?

• Back: The view that perception of the world is a set of acquired or learned skills.

Flashcard 44

• Front: What is top-down processing?

• Back: Perception is a constructive process that relies on past experience or stored information to interpret an unclear stimuli.

Flashcard 45

• Front: According to Richard Gregory, what is perception?

• Back: A hypothesis based on our prior knowledge.

Flashcard 46

• Front: What is bottom-up processing?

• Back: Perception involves build up from the smallest pieces of sensory information. It starts with the details and builds up to the big picture.

Flashcard 47

• Front: According to James Gibson, what is sensation?

• Back: Perception.

Flashcard 48

• Front: What are affordances?

• Back: Meanings that an environment has that guide behavior.

Flashcard 49

• Front: Are top-down or bottom-up processes always used?

• Back: No, perceptual research suggests that both top-down and bottom-up processes interact to produce the best interpretation of the world around us.