Sensation and Perception
- Sensation: Your window to the world
- The process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive stimulus from the environment
- Perception: Interpreting what comes in your window
- Bottom-Up v. Top-Down Processing
- Bottom-Up- Begins within the sense receptors and works up to the brain's integration of sensory information (Thalamus)
- Top-Down Processing- Information processing guided by higher level mental processes
- Absolute Threshold
- The minimum stimulation needed to detect a stimulus 50% of the time
- Difference Threshold
- The minimum difference that a person can detect between two stimuli
- Also known as Just Notable Difference
- Weber’s Law
- The idea that, to perceive a difference between two stimuli, they must differ by a constant percentage; not a constant amount
- Signal Detection Theory
- Predicts how we detect a stimulus amid other stimuli
- Assumes that we do not have an absolute threshold
- Sensory Adaptation
- Decreased responsiveness to stimuli due to constant stimulation
- Selective Attention
- The focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus
- Cocktail-Party Phenomenon
- Ability to focus one’s listening attention on a single talker among a mixture of conversations and background noises, ignoring other conversations
- Form of selective attention
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