Psychology ch 4 and 6
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44 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Sensation | awareness due to a stimulus of a sensory organ |
| Perception | the organization, identification, and interpretation of a sensation in order to form a mental representation |
| synesthesia | the experience of one sense that is evoked by another |
| transduction | what takes place when many sensors in the body convert physical signals from the environment into neural signals sent to the central nervous system |
| psychophysics | methods that measure the strength of a stimulus and the observer's sensitivity to that stimulus |
| Absolute threshold | the minimal intensity needed to barely detect a stimulus |
| (JND) Just noticeable difference | the minimal change in a stimulus that can just barely be detected |
| Weber's Law | The just noticeable difference of a stimulus is a constant proportion despite variations in intensity |
| Signal detection theory | the response to a stimulus depends both on a person's sensitivity to the stimulus in the presence of noise and on a person's response criterion |
| visual acuity | ability to see fine detail |
| retina | light-sensitive tissue lining the back of the eyeball |
| accommodation | the process by which the eye maintains a clear image on the retina |
| cones | detect color, operate under normal daylight conditions, and allow us to focus on fine detail |
| Rods | become active only under low-light for night vision |
| fovea | an area of the retina where vision is the clearest and there are no rods at all |
| blind spot | contains neither rods or cones and therefore has no mechanism to sense light |
| receptive field | the region of the sensory surface that, when stimulated, causes a change in the firing rate of that neuron |
| monocular depth cues | aspect of a scene that yield info about depth when viewed with only one eye |
| binocular disparity | the difference in the retinal image of the two eyes that provides info about depth |
| ames room | ... |
| apparent motion | the perception of movement is a result of alternating signals appearing in rapid succession in different locations |
| pitch | how high or low a sound is |
| loudness | sounds intensity |
| above 85 decibels can be damaging | ... |
| cochlea | a fluid filled tube that is the organ of auditory transduction |
| basilar membrane | a structure in the inner ear that undulates when vibrations from the ossicles reach the cochlear fluid |
| hair cells | specialized auditory receptor neurons embedded in the basilar membrane |
| place code | used mainly for high pitch frequencies, is active when the cochlea encodes different frequencies at different locations along the basilar membrane |
| temporal lobe | registers low frequencies via the firing rate of action potentials entering the auditory nerve |
| Haptic perception | results from our active exploration of the environment by touching and grasping objects with our hands |
| A-delta fibers | which transmit the initial sharp pain |
| C fibers | which transmit longer-lasting, duller pain |
| gate-control theory | A theory of pain perception based on the idea that signals arriving from pain receptors in the body can be stopped |
| vestibular membrane | the three fluid-filled semicircular canals and adjacent organs located next to the cochlea |
| olfaction | smell |
| gustation | taste |
| olfactory receptor neurons | receptor cells that initiate the sense of smell |
| olfactory bulb | a brain structure located above the nasal cavity beneath the frontal lobes |
| Pheromones | biochemical odorants emitted by other membranes of their species that can affect the animal's behavior or physiology |
| taste buds | the organ of taste transduction |
| memory | The ability to store and retrieve info over time. |
| encoding | The process by which we transform what we feel, hear and see into a memory |
| storage | The process of maintaining information in memory over time |
| retrieval | the process of bringing to mind information that has been previously encoded. |
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