unit 5 notes

·         Sensation and perception

- Perception:  interpreting what comes through the window

- Sensation: your window to the world, the process by which our sensory receptors and the nervous system receive stimulus from the environment

     -Bottom-up processing: begins with the sense receptors and works up to the brains integration of sensory information

  - Top- down processing: information processing guided by higher level mental process

·         Absolute threshold: the minimum stimulation needed to detect a stimulus 50% of the time

·         Difference threshold: the minimum difference that a person can be detected between two stimuli AKA just noticeable difference

·         Webster’s Law: the idea that to preserve a difference between stimuli they must differ by a constant percentage, not a constant amount

·         Single diction theory: Predicts how we detect a stimuli amid another stimuli

·         Sensory adaptation: decreased responses to stimuli due to constant stimulation

·         Selective attention: the focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimuli

·         Cocktail- party Phenomenon: the ability to focus ones listening attention on a single taker among a mixture of conversations and background noises ignoring other conversation form or selective listening

·         Vision- our most dominant sense

-          The high to the wave gives us its intensity (brightness)

-          The length of the wave gives us its hue (color)

-          ROY GBIV

-          The longer the wave the more red

-          The shorter the wave length they more violet

·         Transduction: transforming signals into neural impulses information goes from the sense to the thalamus then to various areas

·         Color vision:

-          Trichromatic (3 color) theory

-          3 types of cones

Red

Blue

Green

-          These three types of cones can make millions of combinations of color

·         Opponent- process theory: the sensory receptors come in pairs

-red/ green

-yellow/ blue

-black/ white

-if one color is stimulated the other is inhibited

·         Hearing

-          Amplitude: the height of the wave

-          Frequency: wave gives pitch, longer wave the lower pitch

·         Transduction in the ear: sound waves hit the eardrum then hammer then stir up then oval window

-everything is just vibrating

-then the cochlea vibrates

-in basilar membrane there are hair cells

-when hair calls vibrate they turn vibrations into neutral impulses which are called organ of corti

-sent then to thalamus up authority nerve

·         Pitch theory:

-Place theory: different hairs vibrate in the cochlea when there are different pitches, so some hairs vibrate when they hear high pitches and other vibrate when they hear low pitches

-frequency theory: all the hairs vibrate but as different speed

·         Deafness

-conduction deafness: something goes wrong with the sound and the vibration on the way to the cochlea you can replace the bones or get a hearing aid to help

-nerve (sensor neutral) deafness: the hair cells in the cochlea get damaged loud noises can cause this type of deafness no way to replace the hairs cochlea implant is possible

·         Smell and taste

-sensory interaction: (smell + taste) the principle that one sense may influence another

- Taste: we have bumps on our tongue called papillae; taste buds are located on the papillae (they are actually all over the mouth

- Sweet (tip), salty (front side), sour (back), bitter (base)

- Umami: stays on your tongue (middle)