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Psychology & Life Chapter 5
Sensation and Perception
74
Psychology
Undergraduate 1
07/11/2012

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Term
perception
Definition
The processes that organize information in the sensory image
and interpret it as having been produced by properties of objects or
events in the external, three-dimensional world.
Term
sensation
Definition
The process by which stimulation of a sensory receptor gives
rise to neural impulses that result in an experience, or awareness, of
conditions inside or outside the body.
Term
perceptual organization
Definition
The processes that put sensory information
together to give the perception of a coherent scene over the whole
visual field.
Term
identification and recognition
Definition
Two ways of attaching meaning to
percepts.
Term
distal stimulus
Definition
In the processes of perception, the physical object in the
world, as contrasted with the proximal stimulus, the optical image on
the retina.
Term
proximal stimulus
Definition
The optical image on the retina; contrasted with the
distal stimulus, the physical object in the world.
Term
psychophysics
Definition
The study of the correspondence between physical
simulation and psychological experience.
Term
absolute threshold
Definition
The minimum amount of physical energy needed to
produce a reliable sensory experience; operationally defined as the
stimulus level at which a sensory signal is detected half the time.
Term
psychometric function
Definition
A graph that plots the percentage of detections of
a stimulus (on the vertical axis) for each unit of stimulus intensity (on
the horizontal axis).
Term
sensory adaptation
Definition
A phenomenon in which receptor cells lose their
power to respond after a period of unchanged stimulation; allows a
more rapid reaction to new sources of information.
Term
response bias
Definition
The systematic tendency as a result of nonsensory factors
for an observer to favour responding in a particular way.
Term
signal detection theory
Definition
A systematic approach to the problem of response
bias that allows an experimenter to identify and separate the roles of
sensory stimuli and the individual’s criterion level in producing the
final response.
Term
difference threshold
Definition
The smallest physical difference between two stimuli
that can still be recognized as a difference; operationally defined as the
point at which the stimuli are recognized as different half of the time.
Term
just noticeable difference
Definition
The smallest difference between two sensations
that allows them to be discriminated.
Term
Weber’s law
Definition
An assertion that the size of a difference threshold is
proportional to the intensity of the standard stimulus.
Term
transduction
Definition
Transformation of one form of energy into another; for
example, light is transformed into neural impulses.
Term
sensory receptors
Definition
Specialized cells that convert physical signals into
cellular signals that are processed by the nervous system.
Term
accommodation
Definition
1. 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. 2. According to Piaget, the process of restructuring or
modifying cognitive structures so that new information can fit into
them more easily; this process works in tandem with assimilation.
Term
retina
Definition
The layer at the back of the eye that contains photoreceptors and
converts light energy to neural responses.
Term
photoreceptors
Definition
Receptor cells in the retina that are sensitive to light.
Term
rods
Definition
Photoreceptors concentrated in the periphery of the retina that are
most active in dim illumination; rods do not produce sensation of
colour.
Term
cones
Definition
Photoreceptors concentrated in the centre of the retina that are
responsible for visual experience under normal viewing conditions for
all experiences of colour.
Term
dark adaptation
Definition
The gradual improvement of the eyes’ sensitivity after a
shift in illumination from light to near darkness.
Term
fovea
Definition
Area of the retina that contains densely packed cones and forms the
point of sharpest vision.
Term
bipolar cells
Definition
Nerve cells in the visual system that combine impulses from
many receptors and transmit the results to ganglion cells.
Term
ganglion cells
Definition
Cells in the visual system that integrate impulses from
many bipolar cells in a single firing rate.
Term
horizontal cells
Definition
The cells that integrate information across the retina;
rather than sending signals toward the brain, horizontal cells connect
receptors to each other.
Term
amacrine cells
Definition
Cells that integrate information across the retina; rather
than sending signals toward the brain, amacrine cells link bipolar cells
to other bipolar cells and ganglion cells to other ganglion cells.
Term
optic nerve
Definition
The axons of the ganglion cells that carry information from
the eye toward the brain.
Term
receptive field
Definition
The area of the visual field to which a neuron in the visual
system responds.
Term
hue
Definition
The dimension of colour space that captures the qualitative
experience of the colour of light.
Term
saturation
Definition
The dimension of colour space that captures the purity and
vividness of colour sensations.
Term
brightness
Definition
The dimension of colour space that captures the intensity of
light.
Term
complementary colours
Definition
Colours opposite each other on the colour circle;
when additively mixed, they create the sensation of white light.
Term
trichromatic theory
Definition
The theory that there are three types of colour
receptors that produce the primary colour sensations of red, green, and
blue.
Term
opponent-process theory
Definition
The theory that all colour experiences arise
from three systems, each of which includes two “opponent” elements
(red versus green, blue versus yellow, and black versus white).
Term
pitch
Definition
Sound quality of highness or lowness; primarily dependent on the
frequency of the sound wave.
Term
loudness
Definition
A perceptual dimension of sound influenced by the amplitude
of a sound wave; sound waves in large amplitudes are generally
experienced as loud and those with small amplitudes as soft.
Term
timbre
Definition
The dimension of auditory sensation that reflects the complexity
of a sound wave.
Term
cochlea
Definition
The primary organ of hearing; a fluid-filled coiled tube located in
the inner ear.
Term
basilar membrane
Definition
A membrane in the cochlea that, when set into
motion, stimulates hair cells that produce the neural effects of auditory
stimulation.
Term
auditory nerve
Definition
The nerve that carries impulses from the cochlea to the
cochlear nucleus of the brain.
Term
place theory
Definition
The theory that different frequency tones produce
maximum activation at different locations along the basilar membrane,
with the result that pitch can be coded by the place at which activation
occurs.
Term
frequency theory
Definition
The theory that a tone produces a rate of vibration in
the basilar membrane equal to its frequency, with the result that pitch
can be coded by the frequency of the neural response.
Term
volley principle
Definition
An extension of frequency theory, which proposes that
when peaks in a sound wave come too frequently for a single neuron to
fire at each peak, several neurons fire as a group at the frequency of the
stimulus tone.
Term
sound localization
Definition
The auditory processes that allow the spatial origins of
environmental sounds.
Term
olfactory bulb
Definition
The centre where odour-sensitive receptors send their
signals, located just below the frontal lobes of the cortex.
Term
pheromones
Definition
Chemical signals released by an organism to communicate
with other members of the species; pheromones often serve as
long-distance sexual attractors.
Term
cutaneous senses
Definition
The skin senses that register sensations or pressure,
warmth, and cold.
Term
vestibular sense
Definition
The sense that tells how one’s own body is oriented in the
world with respect to gravity.
Term
kinesthetic sense
Definition
The sense concerned with bodily position and
movement of the body parts relative to one another.
Term
pain
Definition
The body’s response to noxious stimuli that are intense enough to
cause, or threaten to cause, tissue damage.
Term
gate-control theory
Definition
A theory about pain modulation that proposes that
certain cells in the spinal cord act as gates to interrupt and block some
pain signals while sending others to the brain.
Term
phantom limb pain
Definition
Sensations that appear to originate in a limb that has
been amputated.
Term
attention
Definition
A state of focused awareness on a subset of the available
perceptual information.
Term
goal-directed selection
Definition
A determinant of why people select some parts of
sensory input for further processing; reflects the choices made as a
function of one’s own goals.
Term
stimulus-driven capture
Definition
A determinant of why people select some parts
of sensory input for further processing; occurs when features of
stimuli—objects in the environment—automatically capture attention,
independent of the local goals of a perceiver.
Term
dichotic listening
Definition
An experimental technique in which a different
auditory stimulus is simultaneously presented to each ear.
Term
figure
Definition
Objectlike regions of the visual field that are distinguished from
the background.
Term
ground
Definition
The backdrop or background areas of the visual field, against
which figures stand out.
Term
Gestalt psychology
Definition
A school of psychology that maintains that
psychological phenomena can be understood only when viewed as
organized, structured wholes, not when broken down into primitive
perceptual elements.
Term
phi phenomenon
Definition
The simplest form of apparent motion: the movement
illusion in which one or more stationary lights going on and off in
succession are perceived as a single moving light.
Term
retinal disparity
Definition
The displacement between the horizontal positions of
corresponding images in the two eyes.
Term
convergence
Definition
The degree to which the eyes turn inward to fixate on an
object.
Term
relative motion parallax
Definition
A source of information about depth in which
the relative distances of objects from a viewer determine the amount
and direction of their relative motion in the retinal image.
Term
perceptual constancy
Definition
The ability to retain an unchanging percept of an
object despite variations in the retinal image.
Term
size constancy
Definition
The ability to perceive the true size of an object despite
variations in the size of its retinal image.
Term
shape constancy
Definition
The ability to perceive the true shape of an object despite
variations in the shape of the retinal image.
Term
lightness constancy
Definition
The tendency to perceive the whiteness, greyness, or
blackness of objects as constant across changing levels of illuminations.
Term
ambiguity
Definition
Property of perceptual object that may have more than one
interpretation.
Term
illusion
Definition
An experience of a stimulus pattern in a manner that is demonstrably
incorrect but shared by others in the same perceptual environment.
Term
bottom-up processing
Definition
Perceptual analyses based on the sensory data
available in the environment; results of analysis are passed upward
toward more abstract representations.
Term
top-down processing
Definition
Perceptual processes in which information from an
individual’s past experience, knowledge, expectations, motivations, and
background influence the way a perceived object is interpreted and
classified.
Term
set
Definition
A temporary readiness to perceive or react to a stimulus in a particular
way.
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