https://quizlet.com/_2p1qy7

1. Sensation and perception concepts

Objectives-

• Difference between Absolute and difference thresholds: Absolute threshold is your hearing the second you hear something (starting the song at 0 and being able to hear it at 4)

• Difference thresholds is the ability to be able to tell the difference between what you are hearing (song playing at 20 vs. 5)

• Sensory Adaptation ex: When you go into a dark room or outside at night, your eyes eventually adjust to the darkness because your pupils enlarge to let in more light.

• Signal Detection theory ex: In the presence of loud music, you would still be able to hear the phone ringing or vibrating. On the contrary, you would not be able to detect your phone ringing or vibrating in the presence of noise other than ringtone or vibration.

Vocab-

• Sensation: The process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment

• Signal detection theory: A theory predicting how and when we detect the presence of a faint stimulus (signal) amid background stimulation (noise). Assumes there is no single absolute threshold and that detection depends partly on a person's experience, expectations, motivation, and alertness.

• Subliminal: Below one’s absolute threshold for conscious awareness

• Priming: The activation, often unconsciously, of certain associations, thus predisposing one's perception, memory, or response.

• Weber’s Law: The principle that, to be perceived as different, 2 stimuli must differ by a constant minimum %, rather than a constant amount. (if you add a drop of water to an empty glass you can detect change, but if you add a drop of water to a full glass of water, you can’t detect the change. Must add the same percentage of change not amount)

• Difference threshold: The minimum difference between 2 stimuli required for detection 50% of the time. We experience the difference threshold as a [just noticeable difference].

• Sensory Adaptation: Diminished sensitivity as a consequence of constant stimulation. (having a candle burned all day and you can’t smell it anymore)

• Absolute threshold: The minimum stimulus energy needed to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the time

• Bottom-up processing: Analysis that begins with the sensory receptors and works up to the brain’s integration of sensory information. (regular clown)

• Top-down processing: Information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawing on our experience and expectations. (sideways clown)

• Transduction: Conversion of one form of energy into another. In sensation, the transforming of stimulus energies, such as sights, sounds, and smells, into neural impulses our brain can interpret.

1. Vision https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwq23JTBnN0&list=PL-R0qM-A09uydfZBnrkOFv-PC8ZAaUsrj&index=3

Objectives-

• Pathway to the eye (specific)

1. Bipolar cells

2. Ganglion cells

3. Optic nerve

4. Thalamus

5. Visual cortex

• CPILR- how does light pass through the eye

1. Cornea

2. Pupil

3. Iris

4. Lens

5. Retina

• Eye to brain pathway of vision

1. Retina

2. Optic nerve

3. Thalamus

4. Occipital Lobe

VOCAB-

• Intensity: The amount of energy in a light wave or sound wave, which influences what we perceive as brightness or loudness. Intensity is determined by the wave’s amplitude.

• Pupil: The adjustable opening in the center of the eye through which light enters

• Iris: A ring of muscle tissue that forms the colored portion of the eye around the pupil and controls the size of the pupil opening

• Lens: The transparent structure behind the pupil that changes shape to help focus images on the retina

• Retina: The light-sensitive inner surface of the eye. Containing the receptor rods and cones plus layers of neurons that begin the processing of visual information

• Accommodation: The process by which the eye’s lens changes shape to focus near or far objects on the retina.

• Rods: retinal receptors that detect black, white, and gray; necessary for peripheral and twilight vision, when cones dont respond.

• Cones: retinal receptors that are concentrated near the center of the retina and that function in daylight or in well-lit conditions. The cones detect fine detail and give rise to color sensations.

• Optic nerve: the nerve that carries neural impulses from the eye to the brain; information highway to your brain, where your thalamus stands ready to distribute the information it receives from your eyes.

• Blind spot: The point at which the optic nerve leaves the eye, creating a “blind” spot because the receptor cells are located there.

• Fovea: The central focal point in the retina, around which the eye’s cones cluster.

• Feature detectors: Pass information from the ganglion cells to other cortical areas where teams of cells (supercell clusters) respond to more complex patterns.

• Parallel processing: The processing of many aspects of a problem simultaneously; the brain’s natural mode of information processing for many functions; including vision.

• Blindsight: A phenomenon in which patients with damage in the primary visual cortex of the brain can tell where an object is although they claim they cannot see it.

1. Perception

Objectives-

• Through experience we form concepts (schemas), that organize and interpret unfamiliar information. Pre-existing schemas influence how we apply top-down processing to interpret ambiguous sensations.

• The brain can work backwards in time to allow a later stimulus to determine how we perceive an earlier one. The context creates an expectation that, top-down, influences our perception.

• Behavior is caused by attention. An example of how attention is used in behavior is in pain. When we pay attention to a wound we usually avoid harming it even more (broken ankle = don’t use that ankle). Our behavior revolves around our attention to our body.

• Gestalt principles-

• Proximity

• Similarity

• Closure: Filling in gaps to complete a picture

• Continuity: A flowing line instead of several lines

• Connectedness: This refers to the fact that elements that are connected by uniform visual properties are perceived as being more related than elements that are not connected- you see these as a whole

Vocab-

• Gestalt: An organized whole. Gestalt psychologists emphasized our tendency to integrate pieces of information into meaningful wholes.

• Figure ground: The organization of the visual field into objects (the figures) that stand out from their surroundings (the ground).

• Grouping: The perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into current groups

• Depth perception: The ability to see objects in 3 dimensions although the images that strike the retina are 2-dimensional; allow us to judge distance (baby video)

• Visual cliff: A laboratory device for testing depth perception in infants and young animals.

• Binocular cues: Depth cues, such as retinal disparity, that depends on the use of 2 eyes

• Monocular cues: cues that can be perceived by one eye, to create an illusion of death.

• Stroboscopic phenomenon: an illusion of movement created when 2 or more adjacent lights blink on and off in quick succession

• Phi phenomenon: an illusion of movement created when 2 or more pictures blink on and off in quick succession (Ms.Donaldson’s pediatrician book)

• Perceptual constancy: Perceiving objects as unchanging (having consistent color, brightness, shape, and size) even as illumination and retinal image change

• Color constancy: Perceiving familiar objects as having consistent color, even if changing illumination alters the wavelength reflected by the objects

• Perceptual adaptation: In vision, the ability to adjust to an artificially displaced or even inverted visual field

1. Convergence

Vocab-

• Retinal disparity: A binocular cue for perceiving depth: By comparing images from the retinas in the two eyes, the brain computes distance–the greater the disparity (difference) between the two images, the closer the object.

1. Hearing

Objectives-

• Outer ear- pinna

• Tympanic membrane- eardrum

• Hammer, anvil, stirrup- ossicles

• Sound Localization: A sound is detected by a fraction of second earlier on one ear than the other

How we hear-

1. Sound waves enter the outer ear

2. Waves channel from the auditory canal to the eardrum

3. Then the middle ear picks up the vibrations sending it to the cochlea (inner ear)

4. Causes oval window to vibrate

5. Causes ripple in the basilar membrane (bending hair cells)

6. Triggers impulses in adjacent nerve cells

7. Axons of those cells converge to form the auditory nerve

8. Auditory nerve sends messages (VIA THALAMUS) to auditory cortex

• Place theory= high pitches

• Frequency theory= low pitches

• Combination of place and frequency theory- Pitches in intermediate range

VOCAB-

• Audition: The sense or act of hearing

• Frequency: The number of complete wavelengths that pass a point in a given time (for ex: per second)

• Pitch: A tone’s experienced highness or lowness; depends on frequency; measured in decibels

• Middle ear: The chamber between the eardrum and cochlea containing 3 tiny bones (hammer, anvil, and stirrup) that concentrate the vibrations of the eardrum on the cochlea’s oval window.

• Cochlea: A coiled, bony, fluid-filled tube in the inner ear; sound waves traveling through the cochlear fluid trigger nerve impulses.

• Inner ear: The innermost part of the ear, containing the cochlea, semicircular canals, and vestibular sacs.

• Sensorineural hearing loss (COCHLEAR IMPLANT): damage to the cochlear hair cell receptors; more common than conduction hearing loss.

• Conduction hearing loss: Less common form of hearing loss caused by damage to the mechanical system that conducts sound waves to the cochlea.

• Cochlear implant: A device for converting sounds into electrical signals and stimulating the auditory nerve through electrodes threaded into the cochlea

• Place theory: In hearing, the theory that links the pitch we hear with the place where the cochlea’s membrane is stimulated

• Frequency theory: In hearing, the theory that the rate of nerve impulses traveling up the auditory nerve matches the frequency of a tone, thus enabling us to sense its pitch.

1. Pain and other senses

Objectives-

• Touch- Skin receptors detect pressure, warmth, cold, and pain

• Taste- Basic tongue receptors for sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami

• Vision- Rods and cones in the retina

• Hearing- Cochlear hair cells in the inner ear

• What is the link between smell and memory? The nerve connecting the olfactory bulb sends signals directly to the limbic system (think hippocampus here). Therefore, smells can easily trigger memories.

VOCAB-

• Nociceptors: Sensory receptors that enable the perception of pain in response to potentially harmful stimuli

• Gate-control theory: The theory that the spinal cord contains a neurological “gate” that blocks pain signals or allows them to pass on to the brain. The “gate” is opened by the activity of pain signals traveling up small nerve fibers and is closed by activity in larger fibers or by information coming from the brain.

• Kinesthesia: The system for sensing the position and movement of individual body parts.

• **Vestibular sense:**The sense of body movement and position, including the sense of balance.

• Sensory interaction: The principle that one sense may influence another, as when the smell of food influences its taste.

• Semicircular canals: anatomical structure which helps w vestibular sense (sense of body movement/position, how we keep our balance)

IMPORTANT PEOPLE-

• David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel: They showed that our brain’s computing system deconstructs visual images and then reassembles them. They won a Nobel Prize for their work on feature detectors, nerve cells in the brain that respond to a scene’s specific features–to particular edges, angles, lines, and movements.

• Gustav Fechner: He studied our awareness of these faint stimuli and called them our absolute thresholds–the minimum stimulation necessary to detect a particular light, sound, pressure, taste, or odor 50% of the time.