Chapter 3a Sensation Perception Flashcards
Sensation
Is the ability of your sensory organs to pick up energy in the environment around you and transmit it to your brain
Transduction
The conversion of energy outside your body, like light or sound, into neural energy, like brain activity
Perception
The ability of your brain to interpret the raw sensations it has taken in. Perception is your brain’s ability to translate the sights, sounds, and smells into something meaningful or understandable.
Extrasensory perception (ESP)
The debatable notion of perception without sensation. As scientists, psychologists don’t debate ESP with each other. Psychologists largely reject the notion of ESP, which can supposedly take a number of forms
Parapsychology
The study of topics that fall outside the range of mainstream psychology
Absolute threshold
The minimum level of a stimulus necessary for you to detect its presence at least half of the time
Difference threshold (or just noticeable difference)
The smallest change in a stimulus necessary for you to detect it at least half of the time.
sensory adaptation:
The tendency of your sensation of a stimulus to decrease when the stimulus remains constant.
Perceptual constancy
your brain’s ability to maintain the same perception of an object even when conditions around it cause it to produce different sensations
Selective attention
Paying more attention to one sensory channel than others. Selective attention is necessary in most situations, especially those that engage all of your senses simultaneously.
Cocktail party effect
The ability to attend to certain stimuli within one sense (such as hearing) over other stimuli within the same sense
Sensory interaction
The idea that your senses can influence each other
We hear words that coordinate with the timing of the dummy’s mouth moving (rather than the ventriloquist’s mouth), and we perceive that the dummy is talking, at least until we remind ourselves that dummies can’t talk. What we see influences what (we think) we hear
Sensory conflict theory:
A theory that states that motion sickness is a byproduct of sensory interaction. Sensory conflict theory is certainly not the only explanation of motion sickness, and there is research both supporting and disputing it
Bottom-up processing
a way of processing information in which what you sense becomes a perception with no influence of expectations or previous experiences
Top-down processing
A way of processing information in which your expectations or previous experiences influence what you perceive.
