psychology chapter 4 vocab
Terms
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- the overall process of apprehending objects and events in the environment--to sense them, understand them, identify and label them, and prepare to react to them
- perception
- what you perceive
- percept
- process by which stimulation of sensory receptors--the structures in our eyes, ears, and so on--produces neural impulses that represent experiences inside or outside the body
- sensation
- the stage in which an internal representation of an object is formed and a percept of the external stimulus is developed
- perceptual organization
- assigns meaning to percepts
- identification and recognition
- the physical object in the world
- distal stimulus
- the optical image on the retina
- proximal stimulus
- a single image at the sensory level can result in multiple interpretations at the perceptual and identification levels
- ambiguity
- when your perceptual systems actually deceive you into experiencing a stimulus pattern in a manner that is demonstrably incorrect
- illusion
- study of the relationship between physical stimuli and the behavior or mental experiences the stimuli evoke
- psychophysics
- the minimum amount of physical energy needed to produce a sensory experience
- absolute threshold
- a graph that shows the percentage of detections at each stimuls intensity
- psychometric function
- the diminishing responsiveness of sensory systems to prolonged stimulus input
- sensory adaption
- the systematic tendency for an observer to favor responding in a particular way because of factors unrelated to the sensory features of the stimulus
- response bias
- a systematic approach to the problem of response bias
- signal detection theory (SDT)
- the smallest physical difference between two stimuli that can still be recognized as a difference
- difference threshold
- the point at which the stimuli are recognized as different half of the time
- just noticeable difference (JND)
- The JND between stimuli is a constant fraction of the intensity of the standard stimulus
- Weber's law
- the conversion of one form of physical energy, such as light, to another form, such as neural impulses is called
- transduction
- convert the physical for of the sensory signal into cellular signals that can be processed by the nervous system
- sensory receptors
- the process by which the ciliary muscles change the thickness of the lens of the eye to permit variable focusing on near and distant objects
- accommodation
- gradual improvement of the eyes sensitivity after a shift in illumination from light to near darkness
- dark adaptation
- small region near the center of the retina which contains nothing but densely packed cones
- fovea
- nerve cells that combine impulses from many receptors and send the results to ganglion cells
- bipolar cells
- integrates the impulses from one or more bipolar cells into a single firing rate
- ganglion cell
- integrate information across the retina
- horizontal and amacrine cells
- the ultimate destination of much visual information
- visual cortex
- how things look
- pattern recognition
- where things are
- place recognition
- area of a cell in the visual field from which receives stimulation
- receptive field
- dimension that captures the qualitative experience of the color of a light
- hue
- the psychological dimension that captures the purity and vividness of color sensations
- saturation
- the dimension of color experience that captures the intensity of light
- brightness
- wavelengeth that appear directly across from each other on the color circle
- complementary colors
- opposite of original color
- negative afterimage
- all color experiences arise from three underlying systems, each of which includes two opponent elements--red vs green, blue vs yellow, or back (no color) vs white (all colors)
- opponent-process theory
- highness or lowness of a sound determined by the sound's frequency
- pitch
- physical intensity of a sound
- loudness
- explains pitch by the rate of vibration of the basilar membrane
- frequency theory
- ability to determine the spatial origins of auditory events
- sound localization
- chemical substances used within a given species to signal sexual receptivity, danger, territorial boundaries, and food sources
- pheromones
- skin senses
- cutaneous senses
- sense that tells you how your body--expecially your head-- is oriented in the world with respect to gravity
- vestibular sense
- sense that provides constant sensory feedback about what the body is doing during motor activities
- kinesthetic sense
- the body's response to stimulation from harmful stimuli
- pain
- cells in the spinal cord act as neurological gates, interrupting and blocking some pain signals and letting others get through to the brain
- gate-control theory
- the distance from you to an object
- depth
- you see the world as invariant, constant, and stable despite changes in the stimulation of your sensory receptors
- perceptual constancy
- when an opaque object blocks out part of a second object
- interposition or occlusion
- your ability to perceive the true size of an object despite variations in the size of its retinal image
- size constancy
- you percieve an objects actual shape correctly even when the object is slanted away from you
- shape constancy
- your tendency to perceive the whiteness, grayness, or blackness of objects as constant across changing levels of illumination
- lightness constancy
- involves your past experiences, knowledge, motivations, and cultural background in perceiving the world
- top-down-processing
- a temporary readiness to perceive or react to a stimulus in a particular way
- set