𝚫STUDY GUIDE: SENSATION & PERCEPTION

Sensation and Perception #1

1. What are our five main senses?
● Vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste
2. What does the area of Sensation and Perception examine?
● Processes of identifying objects and events in the world so that
we can move through our environment and take action
3. Why do we study sensation and perception?
● Helps us understand behavior and mental activity, which
depend on our ability to gather information about the world
● Helps us understand how our sensory systems should work and
how to fix them
● Better ways of presenting info to people
4. What is sensation?
● Occurs in an organism when physical energy produce some kind
of change in specialized elements of the nervous system called
“receptors”
● Basic detection of physical energy
5. What is perception?
● The results of psychological processes in which sensations are
interpreted and organized to give meaning to the objects or
events that produced the sensations
● Gives more meaning to an event
● Sensations that are shaped by context, relationships,
expectations and memory
● Top-down: influence of cognition
● Bottom-down: influence of the stimulus
6. What is transduction?
● Conversion of physical energy into electrical energy in the
nervous system
7. What are the different ways to measure perception?
● Phenomenological methods: show a stimulus and then ask the
person to describe it
● Works easy for simple stimuli, but not very precise or good for
complex stimuli
● Also doesn’t work well with animals
8. What is the field of psychophysics?
● The study of the relationship between a physical stimulus and
the resulting psychological experiences
● Objectively measure the stimulus (quantification) and the
response
9. What is the difference between detection and discrimination?
● Detection: smallest/ weakest stimulus that we can detect
 ● Discrimination: what’s the smallest difference between stimuli
for us to tell the difference
10. What is an absolute threshold?
● Psychometric function: Graph describing the relationship
between a physical stimulus and psychological experience
( behavioral response)
● Threshold is the stimulus intensity where the person goes from
not hearing the sound to hearing it, like a transition point
● Threshold is usually 50 percent point
11. When do neurons fire action potentials?
● When the neurons are stimulated
12. How does a neuron’s response change when the intensity of a
stimulus changes?
● The firing rate changes( not bigger action potentials but MORE
action potentials )
● Spontaneous activity: neurons fire action potentials in the
absence of stimulation
13. What are response biases when measuring an observer’s ability
to detect a stimulus?
● Two people may be equally sensitive to stimulus but they can
make different decisions
● Person who wants to seem sensitive, more likely to respond yes.
(Liberal bias)
● Their psychometric function will shift left
● Person who wants to seem insensitive will show a conservative
bias(Conservative)
● Their psychometric function will shift right
14. What is signal detection theory?
● A way of accounting for sensitivity and bias
● Computation procedure give us d-
15. What is the difference between a hit, miss, false alarm, and
correct rejection, refer to in signal detection theory?
● HIT: signal presented and identified
● Miss: signal presented and not identified
● False alarm: signal not presented and wrongly identified
● Correct rejection: signal not presented and correctly not
identified

Sensation and Perception #2

1. What is Weber’s Law? (note: this was moved from the first lecture b/c
the lecturer didn’t get to this concept)
● The just noticeable difference (JND) in the intensity of a
stimulus is proportional to the intensity of the standard stimulus
k=𝚫I/I
2. What is adaptation?
 ● The response to a stimulus decreases (adapts) when the
stimulus remains constant
● Neurons get tired after looking at the same thing
3. What is the visual stimulus?
● Electromagnetic energy
● We are sensitive to only a small number of range of wavelengths
4. What are the properties of waves?
● Wavelength, amplitude( how high the wave goes up)
5. What are the stages of visual information processing?
● Light enters the eye. (deals with the physical energy)
● Light falls on the receptor cells (physical and neural energy)
● Cones and rods send signals to ganglion cells, neural signals to
other parts of nervous system
● Ganglion cells transmit neural signals to the brain via the optic
nerve and then the brain gives meaning to the image
● Finally we perceive the object or event in the world
● Receptors-ganglion cells-brain
6. What are the parts of the eye? Be able to identify all the parts
numbered in the image at the bottom of this study guide.
● 1.Pupil
● 2.Cornea
● 3.Lens
● 4.Fovea
● 5.Optic nerve
● 6.Retina
7. Where are the light receptors of the visual system located?
● The fovea/retina
8. What are the two types of light receptors?
● Rods and cones
9. What is accommodation?
● When the muscles attached to the lens contract and they focus
the image on the retina
10. What is the fovea?
● Point of central focus
11. What are the distributions of rods and cones in the retina and how do
those distributions affect vision?
● Almost entirely cones in the fovea, but there are more rods in
the peripheral regions
● Rod vision more sensitive to low levels of light than cone vision
● Cone vision gets more finer detail than rod.
12. What is the blind spot?
● The optic nerve has no room for receptor cells, that’s the blind
spot
13. What is the Trichromatic Theory of Color Vision?
● The relative response of three cone types determine the color
that is perceived.
 ● Subtractive color mixture is painting and things of that nature.
And additive is light mixing
● If all cones give equal response then it’s white light
14. What is the Opponent-Process theory of color vision?
● Elements of the visual systems respond in opposite ways to
complementary wavelengths
● Adapting to one wavelength leads to a greater response to the
complementary wavelength
● Some give (R+/G-) and others give (G+/R-)
15. What are motion aftereffects? (covered in lecture 3)
● Adapting to something that’s moving, then look at a stationary
object, and you will perceive motion in there opposite direction
● Adaptation to one type of neuron leads to after effect consistent
with opposing neuron
16. What is apparent motion? (covered in lecture 3)
● We can give the illusion of motion by giving a rapid series of still
images, (like moving or animation)

Sensation and Perception #3

● What is the auditory stimulus?
● Pressure waves: vibrating sound cause high and low pressure to
radiate from the sound source through the air
● What are the properties of sound waves?
● Amplitude(loudness)
● Frequency(pitch)
● Where does transduction occur in the auditory system?
● The cochlea
● Inner hair cells vibrate
● Then neural signals
● How do we perceive pitch? What is place theory?
● Different parts of the basilar membrane are sensitive to sounds
of different frequencies
● Place theory: Our perception of sound depends on where each
component frequency produces vibrations along the basilar
membrane
● What kind of damage in the ear causes hearing impairments?
● Inner hair cells being damaged(especially the cilia breaking off)
makes transduction not happen
● And outer hair cells damaged worsens our ability to perceive
quieter sounds
● How do we perceive visual depth or how far away an image is from
us?
● Oculomotor cues: Convergence of the eyes and accommodation
(eyes cross to see closer objects)
● Pictorial cues ⇩
 ● Interposition(occlusion) is that nearby objects will partially
conceal farther objects
● Relative size(smaller things are farther away)
● Texture Gradient: As tiles are further away they get closer
together.
● Relative height: Objects that are higher up in a picture are
further away
● Linear perspective:Lines will appear to converge off in the
distance
● Relative depth cue: Things closer move quicker
● Retinal disparities used to determine relative distance of an
object(left and right eyes have different images)
● What is the difference between monocular and binocular depth cues?
What are these different cues?
● Monocular: uses one eye and Binocular uses both
● How do we determine where sounds come from (e.g., binaural cues)?
● Intensity cues: because the head blocks sound waves (sound
coming from the right is more intense than the left ear)
● Timing cues: sound from the right will reach right ear earlier
than left)
● How do we determine how far away sounds are from us?
● Loudness further the source the quieter the sound
● Of someone is far in a room from you the will sound more
echoey
● What is Gestalt Psychology, and what are some of the principles?
● School of thought that emphasizes we perceive patterns and
grouping , not just individual objects
● “Whole is greater than the sum of its parts”
● Law of simplicity: Every structures is seen in a way that the
resulting structure is as simple as possible
● Law of similarity: similar objects are grouped together
● Law of good continuation: we tend to perceive lines as following
a smooth path
● Law of proximity: objects that are physically close together are
grouped together
● Law of connectedness: objects that are connected are perceived
as a unit
● Law of common fate: objects moving together are perceptually
grouped together
● What is perceptual constancy?
● We perceive the characteristics of objects as constant even
though the physical stimulation they produce changes
● Color constancy: colors remain constant even when illumination
level changes
● We perceive the size of objects as remaining constant when the
apparent distance changes
 ● What is the McGurk effect? How does this demonstrate sensory
integration?
● Visual and auditory info is combined to yield the most plausible
perception

● What is the Ponzo illusion and how does it work? (from ZAP)
Consequence of size constancy: So we have two horizontal lines that are the
same size but the various diagonal lines make the upper line appear longer