Lecture 1: Intro To Sensation and Perception Flashcards
What is sensation?
The ability to detect a stimulus and perhaps, turn that detection into a private experience.
What is perception?
The act of giving meaning to a detected sensation.
What is the perceptual process?
Environmental stimulus -> light is reflected and transformed (rod/cone) -> receptor process -> neural processing -> peception -> recognition -> action
What is Bottom up processing?
Incoming data.
What is top down processing?
Existing knowledge.
Define psychophysics?
Psychophysics is the science of defining quantitative relationships between physical and psychological events.
What’s the oblique effect?
The oblique effect is being fast at something and slow at a similiar stimulus.
What is absolute threshold?
The minimum amount of stimulation necessary for a person to detect a stimulus 50% of the time. (Example: sense is vision and the threshold is seeing a candle 50km away).
What is Fechner’s law?
Subjective sensation increases proportionally to the logarithm of the stimulus intensity.
define Steven’s Power Law?
The magnitude of subjective sensation is proportional to the stimulus magnitude raised to an exponent.
What is cross-modality matching?
The ability to match the intensities of sensations that come from different sensory modalities.
Define Signal Detection Theory?
A theory that the detection of a stimulus depends both on the participants sensitivity (d’) to the stimulus and on the participant’s response criterion.
What are the 2 chemical senses?
The olfactory system and the gustatory system.
Define turbinates?
Small ridges inside the nose that add turbulence to sniffed air before it reaches the olfactory cleft and olfactory epithelium.
What is glomerulus?
A cluster of incoming axons of the olfactory sensory neurons.
