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Psychology 104 HUNTER > Sensation & Perception - Chapter 5 > Flashcards

Sensation & Perception - Chapter 5 Flashcards

1
Q

What is Sensation and Perception?

A

SENSATION
-Stimulation of the sense organs

PERCEPTION
-The selection, organization, and interpretation of sensory input

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2
Q

What is Psychophysics?

A

-The study of how physical stimuli are translated into psychological experiences
(Gustav Fechner)

  • Sensation begins with a STIMULUS (any detectable input from the environment
  • In order for something to be detected, it must reach our ABSOLUTE THRESHOLD (Minimum amount of stimulation that an organism can detect.) Detected right 50% of the time
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3
Q

The JND and Weber’s Law

A

The JND (Just Noticable Difference) is the smallest difference in the amount of stimulation that a specific sense can detect (difference threshold)

WEBERS LAW
The size of the JND is a constant proportion of the size of the initial stimulus

WEBERS FRACTION
The constant proportion mentioned above. Weber fractions differ depending on sensory input
(Fraction to detect differences in weight is 1/50)

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4
Q

Psychophysical Scaling

A

Everything is relative in perception - we can’t measure things using absolute scales

This is because of FECHNERS LAW, which states that subjective sensation is proportional to the logarithm of the stimulus intensity
(Constant increments in stimulus intensity produce smaller and smaller increases in the perceived magnitude of sensation

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5
Q

Signal Detection

A

The signal-detection theory proposes that the detection of stimuli involves decision processes as well as sensory processes, which are both influenced by a variety of factor besides stimulus intensity

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6
Q

What is Subliminal Perception?

A

the registration of sensory input without conscious awareness

ex. lipton iced tea experiment

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7
Q

Sensory Adaptation

A

A gradual decline in sensitivity due to prolonged stimulation. (Wearing a watch and clothes, you dont feel it after a while)

Adaptive process - keeps us attuned to the changes in our environment rather than the constants

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8
Q

The Stimulus: Sound

A
  • Sound waves are vibrations of molecules that ravel through a medium, such as air
  • Move at a fraction of the speed of light
  • Characterized by their AMPLITUDE, their WAVELENGTH, and PURITY
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9
Q

Human Hearing Capacities

A

Wavelengths of sound are described in terms of their FREQUENCY, which is measured in cycles per second or HERTZ (HZ) (Pitch depends mainly on frequency)

  • Humans can hear sounds ranging from a low of 20-Hz to a high of about 20,000-Hz
  • Amplitude of a sound wave is measured in DECIBELS (dB). In general, the greater the amplitude of a sound wave, the louder it will be perceived.
  • A general rule is that perceived loudness doubles about every 6-10dB.
  • Even brief exposure to sounds > 120 dB can be painful and cause damage to your auditory system.
  • We have the lowest absolute threshold for sound amplitude when sounds are in the 2000-Hz range
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10
Q

Sensory Processing in the Ear

A

THREE MAJOR PARTS OF THE EAR

  1. Outer ear
  2. Middle ear
  3. Inner ear

-Sound is conducted differently in each section

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11
Q

Theories of Hearing

A

Two main theories of pitch perception

PLACE THEORY
-Holds that perception of pitch corresponds to the vibration of different portions, or places, along the basilar membrane.

FREQUENCY THEORY
-Holds that perception of pitch corresponds to the rate, or frequency, at which the entire basilar membrane vibrates

  • While both theories have been proven to have some flaws, they essentially are BOTH correct
  • Current thinking is that pitch perception depends both on the place and frequency coding of vibrations
  • Low freq tones appear to be translated into pitch through frequency coding
  • High freq pure tones appear to rely on place coding
  • Complex tones depending on complex combinations of place and frequency coding
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12
Q

Auditory Localization

A
  • Locating the source of a sound in space
  • Ears being set apart in humans help auditory localization
  • Two cues are particularly important: SOUND INTENSITY (loudness), and the timing of sounds arriving at each ear
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13
Q

Deafness

A
  • 1 in 1000 people are deaf
  • Several causes of deafness, some genetic others derive from disease, injury, or exposure to loud noise

TWO MAJOR TYPES OF DEAFNESS ARE

  1. CONDUCTIVE DEAFNESS
  2. NERVE DEAFNESS
    - noise induced hearing loss is a big problem in our society
    - Some age-related hearing loss is normal
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14
Q

Music and Its Effects

A

Sacks (2007)
-Showed that the brains of musicians are identifiable in that they have larger MOTOR, AUDITORY, and VISUOSPATIAL areas of the CEREBELLUM than the brains of non-musicians

  • Some links between music training and some language abilities
  • Been suggested that music can enhance our spatial abilities (MOZART EFFECT)
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15
Q

The Gustatory System

A

Sensory system for taste

  • Physical stimuli for the sense of taste are chemical substances that are soluble
  • Gustatory receptors are clusters of taste cells found in the taste buds that line the tranches around tiny bumps on the tongue

FOUR PRIMARY TASTES

  1. Sweet, 2. Sour, 3. Bitter, 4. Salty

SOMETIMES A FIFTH 5. Umami

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16
Q

Perception of Taste

A

Perceptions of taste quality appear to depend on the complex patterns of neural activity initiated by taste receptors

  • Some basic taste preferences appear to be innate and automatically regulated by physiological mechanisms
  • But, overall, taste preferences are largely learned
  • People cary in their sensitivity to certain tastes

NONTASTERS vs SUPERTASTERS vs MEDIUM TASTERS
(Variations in sensitivity mean that when two people taste the same food, they will not have the same sensory experience)

-Taste sensitivity influences people’s eating habits
(Supertasters generally have better health habits than non-tasters

-Women more likely to be supertasters than men

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17
Q

Perception of Flavour

A

Perception of taste is different than taste

-Flavour is a combination of taste, smell, and the tactile sensation of food in one’s mouth (odours very imp to the perception of flavour)

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18
Q

The Olfactory System

A

Smell

  • Humans usually characterized as being relatively insensitive to smell
  • Physical stimuli are chemical substances - volatile ones that are carried in the air
  • Receptors for smell are OLFACTORY CILIA, hair-like structures located in the upper portion of the nasal passages

Buck & Axel (1991) clarified the mechanisms involved in odour recognition
-Found a gene set consisting of 1000 different genes that affec tthe operation of our olfactory receptor cells

  • Odours cant be classified as neatly as tastes
  • Humans have about 350 different types of olfactory receptors
  • Sense of smell shows sensory adaption (Perceived strength of an odour usually fades to less than half its original strength within four minutes)
  • Humans can distinguish among about 10,000 different odours
  • Females tend to be somewhat more accurate than males on odour recognition tasks
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19
Q

Chemical Communication

A

PHEROMONES: chemical messages, typicallly imperceptible, that can be sent by one organism and received by another member of the same species.

-Humans give off, and are susceptible to, other humans’ pheromones

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20
Q

Touch

A
  • Physical stimuli for touch are mechanical, thermal,and chemical energy that impinge on the skin
  • These stimuli can produce perceptions of tactile stimulation (the pressure of touch against the skin), warmth, cold, and pain
  • Human skin is saturated with at least 6-types of sensory receptors
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21
Q

Feeling Pressure

A
  • Tactile localization very precise (for ex, a mosquito biting you)
  • Sensory adaptation occurs with our perception of pressure, just like our other senses
  • Nerve cells that carry information about tactile stimulation are routed through the spinal cord to the brainstem
  • Tactile pathway then projects through the thalamus onto the somatosensory cortex
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22
Q

Feeling Pain

A

Important warning system. Critical for survival

  • Receptors of pain are mostly free nerve endings in the skin
  • Pain signals transmitted to the brain VIA two types of pathways that pass through different areas in the thalamus
FAST PATHWAY (A-delta pathway)
SLOW PATHWAY (C fibre pathway)
23
Q

Pain Perception

A

Perception of pain can be influenced greatly by expectations, personality, mood, and other factors involving higher mental processes

-Attention and pain perception interact

24
Q

Blocking Pain/ How does the CNS block incoming pain signals?

A

GATE-CONTROL THEORY
-Holds that incoming pain sensations must pass through a “Gate” in the spinal cord that can be closed, thus blocking ascending pains signals.

-Gate is not an anatomical structure, but a pattern of neural activity

Endorphins, the descending pain pathway, and serotonin seem to modulate pain perception

25
Q

Kinesthetic & Vestibular Systems

A

KINESTHETIC SYSTEM
-Monitors the positions of the various parts of the body (most kinesthetic stimulation is transmitted to the brain along the same pathway as tactile stimulation)

VESTIBULAR SYSTEMS
-A system which responds to gravity and keeps you informed of your body’s location in space

  • Shares space in the inner ear with the auditory system
  • SEMICIRCULAR CANALS make up the largest part of the vestibular system
  • Critical for keeping you oriented and balanced in space
26
Q

Light Stimulus

A

-Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation that travels as a wave

-Light waves cary in amplitude and wavelength
(Amplitude affect mainly the perception of brightness)
(Wavelength affects mainly the perception of colour)

-What humans see can also varies in purity
(Purity influences perception of the saturation, or richness, of colours

27
Q

The Eye

A

The eyes serve TWO main purposes

1) They channel light to the neural tissue that receives it, called the RETINA
2) They house that tissue

Light enters through the CORNEA and then passes through the LENS
(Lens is capable of adjustments - Called ACCOMMODATIONS)
-When you focus on a CLOSE object the lens of your eye gets fatter (rounder) to give you a clear image
-When you focus on a FAR object, the lens flattens to give you a better image

Eyes can make adjustments to alter the amount of light reaching the retina

IRIS: the coloured ring of muscle surrounding the pupil. The iris is responsible for regulating the size of the puil

PUPIL: the black centre of the eye. It is located in the centre of the iris, and helps regulate the amount of light passing into the rear chamber of the eye

The eye itself is in constant motion. The minor constant movements of the eye are called SACCADES

  • Critical for good vision
  • May give away what we are attending to (even when were trying to be COVERT)
28
Q

The Retina

A

The retina is the neural tissue lining the inside back surface of the eye; it absorbs light, processes images, and sends visual info to the brain

29
Q

Visual Receptors: Rods and Cones

A

-The retina contains two types of receptors

CONES (Specialized visual receptors that play a key role in daylight vision and colour vision)
-Cones are concentrated mostly in the centre of the retina, and less toward the periphery.

RODS (specialized visual receptors that play a key role in night vision an peripheral vision)
-The density of the rods is greatest just outside the FOCEA, and gradually decreases toward the PERIPHERY

30
Q

Dark and Light Adaptation

A

DARK ADAPTATION
The process in which the eyes become more sensitive to light in low illumination
-Dark adaptation is complete in 30 minutes

LIGHT ADAPTATION
the process whereby the eyes become less sensitive to light in high illumination (occurs quickly)

31
Q

Colour Vision

A

Colour is a psychological interpretation. It is not a physical property of light itself.

All THREE properties of light influence the perception of colour

  1. WAVELENGTH most closely related to the hue
  2. AMPLITUDE to brightness (value)
  3. PURITY to saturation

Humans can discriminate among millions of colours

32
Q

Colour Mixture

A

TWO kinds of colour mixture.

SUBTRACTIVE COLOUR MIXING
Works by removing some wavelengths of light, leaving less light than was originally there.

ADDITIVE COLOUR MIXING
Works by superimposing lights, putting more light in the mixture than exists in any one light by itself

33
Q

Trichromatic Theory of Colour Vision

A

Holds that the human eye has three types of receptors with different sensitivities to different light wavelengths

  • Eye has specialized receptors sensitive to the specific wavelengths of red, green, and blue
  • All colours are created by an additive mixing process

Does a good job explaining COLOUR BLINDNESS
-Most people who are colour blind are DICHROMATS
(Three types, red, green, or blue insensitive dichromatism)

34
Q

Opponent Process Theory of Colour Vision

A

Holds that colour perception depends on receptors hat make antagonistic responses to three pairs of colours (so only one can be expressed at a time)

  • Red vs green
  • Yellow vs blue
  • Black vs white

Can explain some difficulties of colourblind ppl

COMPLEMENTARY COLOURS
-Pairs of colours that produce grey tones when mixed together

AFTERIMAGE
-A visual image that persists after a stimulus is removed

35
Q

Reconciling Trichromatic and Opponent Process theories

A

It takes both theories to explain colour vision

The eye actually has three types of cones, with each type being most sensitive to a different band of wavelenghts

There are also cells in the retina, LATERAL GENICULATE NUCLEUS (LGN), and the visual cortex that respond in opposite ways to red vs green and blue vs yellow

36
Q

Effects of Colour on Behaviour

A
  • Red undermines performance in achievement contexts (ppl given red tests did worst)
  • Colour red also evokes avoidance tendencies that disrupt attention
  • Colour red also affects rating of attractiveness
  • Our eyes can follow red targets on a computer screen more quickly and easily than targets in other colours
37
Q

Depth Perception

A

DEPTH PERCEPTION

involves the interpretation of visual cues that indicate how near or far away objects are

-To perceive depth, people use a variety of cues, which can be classified broadly into monocular and binocular cues

BINOCULAR DEPTH CUES
are clues about distance based on the differing views from your two eyes

Main Cue: RETINAL DISPARITY
-Refers to the fact that objects project images to slightly different locations on the right and left retinas, so that the right and left eyes see slightly different views of the object.

Another cue: CONVERGENCE
-Involves sensing the eyes converging toward each other as they focus on closer objects

MONOCULAR DEPTH CUES
are clues about distance based on the image in either eye alone

1) Motion Parallax
- Involves images of objects at different distances moving across the retina

2) Pictorial depth cues
Clues about distance that can be given in a flat picture
-Linear perspective
-Interposition
-Size
-Height
38
Q

Bottom-Up Processing

A

Emphasizes the stimulus characteristics that are important when you recognize an object

Specifically, it is the process by which the PHYSICAL STIMULI from the environment are registered on the SENSORY RECEPTORS and then passed on to higher, more sophisticated levels of the PERCEPTUAL SYSTEM

39
Q

Top-Down processing and visual object recognition

A

Contextual factors and their related expectations can affect speed of object recognition

Ex. When the “tHe mAn rAn” sentence, h and a are the same shape but they are perceived differently depending on knowledge and expectations etc

Especially strong when a stimulus is registered for just a fraction of a second and when stimuli are incomplete or ambiguous

Bottom-Up and top-down processing are necessary to explain the complexities of OBJECT RECOGNITION

40
Q

Organization of Visual Perception

A

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY
Emphasizes that humans have basic tendencies to actively organize what they see

For human perception, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

A GESTALT
Has an overall quality that transcends the individual elements

When two areas share a common boundary

  • They have FIGURE and GROUND
  • Figure and ground are not always fixed such as in an AMBIGOUS FIGURE-GROUND RELATIONSHIP (When we see two pictures in a picture)
41
Q

Reason for Figure-Ground Reversals

A

TOP-DOWN and BOTTOM-UP

BOTTOM-UP:
the Neurons in the visual cortex become adapted to one figure, so you are more likely to see the alternative

TOP-DOWN:
people actively try to solve the visual paradox by switching between two reasonable solutions

42
Q

Figure-Ground and Illusory Contours

A

We can even see the figure-ground relationship when a scene has no clear-cut boundary between the figure and the ground. One type of illusion related to this is the ILLUSORY CONTOURS

43
Q

Theory of Unconscious Interference

A

some of our perceptions are the result of unconscious assumptions that we make about the environment

Include the LIKELIHOOD PRINCIPLE
-states we perceive the object that is MOST LIKELY to have caused the pattern of stimuli we have received

44
Q

Gestalt Laws of Organization

A

PERCEPTUAL ORGANIZATION
-The way elements are grouped together to create larger objects

Proposed a number of laws of perceptual organization (As follows)

LAW OF GOOD CONTINUATION

  • points that, when connected, result in straight or smoothly curving lines are seen as belonging together, and the lines tend to be seen in such as way as to follow the smoothest path
  • objects that are overlapped by other objects are perceived as continuing the overlapping object

THE LAW OF PRAGNANZ

  • Also called the law of good figure or law of simplicity
  • States that every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way as the resulting structure is as simple as possible

LAW OF SIMILARITY
-Similar things tend to be grouped together

LAW OF FAMILIARITY
-Things that form patterns that are familiar or meaningful are likely to be grouped togther

45
Q

Optical Illusions

A

Involves an apparently inexplicable discrepancy between the appearance of a visual stimulus and its physical reality.

MULLER-LYER ILLUSION
-arrows bending inward or outward which gives the perception of looking into the corner of a room or the corner of outside of a building

PONZO ILLUSION
-Lines caving in giving the perception of something that is far (even though the two people may be the same size when measured in the picture)

THE AMES ROOM
-Angled room, but when you look into a peep hole it looks like one person is larger than the other

46
Q

Impossible Figures

A

Are objects that can be represented in two dimensional pictures, but cannot exist in three-dimensional space

47
Q

Cross-Cultural Studies of Illusion

A

Differences among cultural groups in their propensity to see different illusions
-Many non-western cultures, such as the zulu in africa, are not prone to the muller-lyer illusion (due to their rounded huts etc)

WHY?

  • Westerners live in a “CARPENTERED WORLD”
  • Some non-western cultures do not
48
Q

Bipolar and Ganglion Cells

A

Bipolar cells have synaptic connections with the rods and cones

The bipolar cells, in turn, synapse with a layer of about ONE MILLION GANGLION CELLS (The bundled axons of ganglion cells form the OPTIC NERVE)

Input from more than 126 million rods and cones is eventually funnelled into only ONE MILLION traffic lanes heading out of the RETINA toward higher visual centres

RODS and CONES are not only placed at the rear layer of the retina, but their light sensitive ends actually point AWAY from the direction of the incoming light

49
Q

Visual Ascuity

A

Ability to see fine detail

50
Q

Blind Spot

A

Occurs when the OPTIC NERVE forms by the axons of ganglion cells combining together and exiting through the back of the eye not far from the FOVEA

51
Q

Visual Transduction

A

Rods and cones translate light waves into nerve impulses through the action of protein molecules called PHOTOPIGMENTS

52
Q

Transduction

A

When sensory receptors translate info into the only language our nevous system understands

Once this translation occus, the specialized nerurons called FEATURE DETECTORS break down an danalyze specific features of the stimuli

53
Q

Myopia vs Hyperopia

A

MYOPIA
(Nearsightedness)
-Good vision up close
-Lens focuses the image in front of the retina (close to the lens)
-Usually occus when the eyeball is longer (front to back)

HYPEROPIA
(Farsightedness)
-People who are good at seeing far objects
-Occus when the lens does not thicken enough
-The image is therefore focused on a point BEHIND the retina (too far from the lens)

AGING CAN IMPROVE MYOPIC PEOPLE, OPPOSITE FOR HYPEROPIA

Retina is an extension of the brain.

54
Q

The Ear

A

Typanic Membrane (EARDRUM)

OSSICLES

  1. Malleus (HAMMER)
  2. Incus (ANVIL)
  3. Stapes (STIRRUP)

Psychology 104 HUNTER (11 decks)

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