SENSATION

 Sensation: the process by which our sensory receptors and nervous

system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment

 Thresholds—human senses can only detect some sensory stimuli

 Psychophysics: study of how physical energy of stimuli relates to our

psychological experience

 Absolute Thresholds: the minimum stimulation needed to detect a

particular stimulus 50 percent of the time

 Signal Detection Theory: a theory predicting how and when we

detect the presence of a faint stimulus amid background stimulation.
Assumes that there is no single absolute threshold and that detection
depends partly on a person’s experience, expectations, motivation,
and level of fatigue

 Subliminal Stimulation: The idea that we can sense stimuli that is

below one’s absolute threshold for conscious awareness (subliminal
messaging)

 Difference Thresholds: the minimum difference between two stimuli

required for detection 50 percent of the time. We experience the
difference threshold as a just noticeable difference (just noticeable
difference)

 Weber’s Law: the principle that, to be perceived as different, two

stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage (not a
constant amount)

 Sensory Adaptation: diminishing sensitivity to an unchanging stimulus

 Odors become less present as we stay in a room for a while

 Vision

 Trasnduction: conversion of one form of energy into another. In

sensation, the transforming of stimulus energies into neural impulses

 Know the parts of the eyes—in the class notes

 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
  Blind spot: the part of the eye with no optic nerve

 Fovea: retina’s area of central focus

 Visual Information Processing

 Retinal cells are very responsive, can be triggered by pressure!

 Feature detector: nerve cells in the brain that respond to specific

features of the stimulus, such as shape, angle or movement

 Parallel processing: the processing of several aspects of a problem

simultaneously; the brain’s natural mode of information processing for
many functions, including vision. Contrasts with the step-by-step
(serial) processing of most computers and of conscious problem
solving

 Color Vision

 Young-Helmholtz trichromatic (three color) theory: the theory

that the retina contains three different color receptors—one most
sensitive to red, one to green, one to blue—which when stimulated
in combination can produce the perception of any color

 Opponent-process theory: the theory that opposing retinal

processes (red-green, yellow-blue, white-black) enable color vision

 Color Constancy: perceiving familiar objects as having consistent

color, even if changing illumination alters the wavelengths reflected by
the object

 Hearing

 Audition: the sense of hearing

 Frequency: the number of complete wavelengths that pass a point in

a given time

 Pitch: a tone’s highness or lowness, depends on frequency

 The Ear

 Middle ear: the chamber between the eardrum and cochlea

containing three tiny bones (hammer, anvil, and stirrup) that
concentrate the vibrations of the eardrum on the cochlea’s oval
window
  Inner ear: the innermost part of the ear, containing the cochlea,
semicircular canals, and vestibular sacs

 Cochlea: a coiled, bony, fluid-filled tube in the inner ear through

which sound waves trigger nerve impulses

 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

 Hearing Loss and Deaf Culture

 Conduction hearing loss: hearing loss caused by damage to the

mechanical system that conducts sound waves to the cochlea

 Sensorineural hearing loss: hearing loss caused by damage to the

cochlea’s receptor cells or to the auditory nerves

 Touch

 Pain—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

 Taste

 Sensory interaction: the principle that one sense may influence

another, as when the smell of food influences its taste

 Smell

 Kinesthesis: 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

PERCEPTION
 Perception: the process of organization and interpreting sensory
information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events
 Selective Attention: at any moment we focus our awareness on only a
limited aspect of what we experience

 e.g. Cocktail party effect: Ability to attend selectively to only one voice
among many

 Reason why change blindness occurs (moon-walking bear in basketball

video)

 Visual Caption: Tendency for vision to dominate the other senses

 Reason why even though sound of movie comes behind us, we

perceive it as coming from the screen

 Gestalt Perception: Emphasizes our tendency to integrate pieces of

information into meaningful wholes

 Essentially, we constantly filter sensory info and infer perceptions in

ways that make sense to us

 Figure-ground: organization of the visual field into objects (figures)

that stand out from surroundings (ground)

 e.g. among the voices you hear at a party, the one you attend to
becomes the figure. Everyone else = ground

 Grouping: the perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into coherent

groups

 Proximity: Group nearby figures together

 Similarity: Figures similar to each other, we group together

 Continuity: We perceive smooth, continuous patterns rather than

discontinuous ones

 Connectedness: When they are uniform and linked, we perceive

spots, lines, or areas as a single unit

 Closure: We fill in gaps to create a complete, whole object

 Depth Perception: The ability to visualize objects in 3-d, even

though the image we see is 2-D. (Judge distance)

 Visual Cliff: lab device for testing depth perception in infants &
young animals
  Binocular cues: depth cues, such as retinal disparity and
convergence that depend on the use of two eyes

• Retinal Disparity: cue to perceive depth. By comparing images

from the two eyeballs, the brain computes distance—the greater
the difference between the two images, the closer the object

 Monocular cues: distance cues, such as linear perspective and

overlap, available to either eye alone

• Relative size: If we assume smaller image is farther away

• Interposition: If an object partially blocks another, we perceive

it as closer

• Relative clarity: We perceive hazy objects as farther away than

sharp, clear objects

• Texture gradient: Objects far away appear smaller and more

densely packed

• Relative height: Perceive objects higher in our field of vision as

farther away

• Relative motion: Objects beyond the fixation point appear to

move with you; farther away the object, the lower its apparent
speed. Brain uses these speed & direction cues to compute
relative distances.

• Linear perspective: The more lines that converge, the greater

their perceived distance

• Light and shadow: Dimmer objects seem farther away

 Motion Perception: Assumption that shrinking objects are retreating

and vice versa.

 Phi phenomenon: an illusion of movement created when 2+

adjacent lights blink on and off in succession

 Perceptual Constancy: perceiving objects as unchanging even as

illumination and retinal images change

 e.g. you can recognize your classmate at different places

 Shape and Size Constancies: We perceive the form of familiar

objects as constant even if they look different
 Perceptual Interpretation: Deals with how we learn to perceive

 Sensory Deprivation and Restored Vision: Can man born blind

taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere? No,
since he would never have learned to see the difference

 Critical period for normal sensory and perceptual development

 i.e. kittens raised without exposure to horizontal lines later had

difficulty perceiving horizontal bars

 Perceptual Adaption: In vision, the ability to adjust to an artificially

displaced or even inverted visual field

 People can adapt to their movements and learn to see with ease
even if their world shifts to left/right/etc

 Perceptual Set: a mental predisposition to perceive one thing and

not another

 Explains why some of us “see” monsters, faces, and UFOs, while

others do not

 Human factors psychology: a branch of psych that explores how

people & machines interact and how machines and physical
environments can be adapted to human behaviors

 Focuses on how machines and physical environments can be better

suited to use

 Extrasensory Perception (ESP): the controversial claim that

perception can occur apart from sensory input

 Parapsychology: study of paranormal phenomena, including ESP and

psychokinesis

 Telepathy: mind-to-mind communication, one person sending

thoughts to another or perceiving thoughts

 Clairvoyance: perceiving remote events, such as sensing that a

friend’s house is on fire

 Precognition: perceiving future events, such as a political leader’s

death or a sporting event’s outcome