Chapters 1-5 vocab

Question 1

Sensation

Answer 1

immediate, fundamental, direct experience

Question 1

Perception

Answer 1

organization and interpretation of sensory information

Question 2

Neural processing

Answer 2

signals travel in a network (maze) of neurons

Question 3

Frontal lobe

Answer 3

lobe of the brain that recognizes high order processing

Question 4

Temporal lobe

Answer 4

lobe of the brain that distinguishes sounds

Question 5

Parietal lobe

Answer 5

lobe of the brain that deals with skin senses

Question 6

Occipital lobe

Answer 6

lobe of the brain that deals with vision

Question 7

Thalamus

Answer 7

nugget inside your brain that processes every sense, except for smell, and deciding whether or not to send to a lobe for interpretation

Question 8

Light

Answer 8

stimulus for visual perception

Question 9

Retina

Answer 9

back of the eye where receptors reside (2D)

Question 10

Fovea

Answer 10

central point of focus, cluster of cones in the retina

Question 11

Summation

Answer 11

The ganglion cell keeps track all of the input of all
of the rods and decides to send a signal based in that input

Question 12

Presbyopia

Answer 12

impaired vision as a result of aging

Question 13

Transduction

Answer 13

light energy into electrical energy

Question 14

Opsin

Answer 14

visual pigment molecules in the outer segment of a receptor; a large protein

Question 15

Retinal

Answer 15

visual pigment molecules in the outer segment of a receptor; a light sensitive molecule

Question 16

Isomerization

Answer 16

retinal changes the molecule’s shape

Question 17

Synapse

Answer 17

gap between axon of one neuron and dendrite of the next

Question 18

Receptors

Answer 18

specialized neurons that respond to specific kinds of energy

Question 19

Resting potential

Answer 19

the negative charge of the neuron relative to its surroundings

Question 20

Action potential

Answer 20

a rapid sequence of changes in the voltage across a membrane.

Question 21

Excitatory transmitters

Answer 21

cause depolarization
neuron becomes more positive, increases the likelihood of an action potential

Question 22

Inhibitory transmitters

Answer 22

cause hyperpolarization, neuron becomes more negative, decreases the likelihood of an action potential

Question 23

Mach bands

Answer 23

illusory light and dark bands near a light-dark border

Question 24

lateral geniculate nucleus

Answer 24

a place in the thalamus that receives impulses from the optic nerve

Question 25

Superior colliculus

Answer 25

recieves 10% of optic nerve fibers, involved in controlling eye movements

Question 26

Selective rearing

Answer 26

raising an organism in an environment that only contains certain types of stimuli

Question 27

Receptive fields

Answer 27

the area on the retina that influences the firing rate of the neurons

Question 28

Retinotopic map

Answer 28

each place on the retina corresponds to a place on the LGN

Question 29

Sensory code

Answer 29

representation of perceived objects through neural firing (Halle Berry)

Question 30

“grandmother cell” hypothesis

Answer 30

a hypothetical neuron which encodes and responds to a highly specific but complex stimulus, such as one’s grandmother

Question 31

Neural correlate of consciousness (NCC)

Answer 31

how physiological responses correlate with experience

Question 32

Prosopagnosia

Answer 32

face blindness

Question 33

Distributed coding

Answer 33

representation of an object or experience by the pattern of firing of a number of neurons

Question 34

Feature Detectors

Answer 34

neurons that fire to specific features of a stimulus

Question 35

Inverse projection problem

Answer 35

an image on the retina can be caused by an infinite number of
objects

Question 36

FFA

Answer 36

fusiform face area in the temporal lobe specialized to recognizing faces

Question 37

Viewpoint Invariance

Answer 37

humans can easily recognize objects when seen from different viewpoints.

Question 38

Lightness

Answer 38

a property of a material surface and how much light it reflects

Question 39

Orientation tuning curves

Answer 39

shows response of simple cortical cell for orientations of stimuli

Question 40

Double dissociation

Answer 40

two functions are localized in different areas of the brain

Question 41

Gestalt Approach

Answer 41

the whole differs from the sum of its parts

Question 42

Visual transduction

Answer 42

occurs when the retinal absorbs one photon