AP Psychology Review Chapter 04: Sensation and Perception 1. What is perception? The process by which the brain organizes and interprets sensation 2. Which senses allow for sensation at a distance? Vision and audition allow sensation at a distance 3. What is psychophysics? The study of the relationship between the physical world and the psychological experience of them 4. What is transduction? The process of converting physical energy or stimulus information into neural impulses 5. What are sensory receptors? The cells that respond to environmental stimuli and typically generate action potentials in adjacent sensory neurons 6. To what do receptors in the eye respond? Wavelengths of light 7. I turn on my television and can't hear the program. This causes me to turn up the volume so I can finally hear the show 50 percent of the time. What have I done? I have crossed my absolute threshold 8. What types of things affect the absolute threshold? Internal noise, external noise, and stress 9. If I change the temperature on the thermostat and yet do not notice the air is any warmer, what has happened? I have changed the room temperature but not enough to cross the difference threshold 10. What is just noticeable difference? The smallest difference in intensity between two stimuli that a person can detect 11. What is the key conclusion that one might draw from Weber s law, Fechner s law, and Steven s power law? Sensation has a direct relationship to physical stimuli, although psychological experience is not an exact copy of external reality 12. Why is it that 15 minutes after entering a florist, you hardly smell the flowers anymore? Sensory adaptation 13. What is the range of light that can be seen by a normally sighted human?
400 to 700 nm 14. What is the difference between an owl s use of light and a human s use of light? Scientists find that owls make use of light at 12,000 nm in order to catch prey, and humans cannot see that light at that level 15. Why is light a useful form of energy? It travels very quickly; It travels in straight lines; It is either absorbed or reflected when it hits a surface 16. Which parts of the eye are associated with the focusing of light on the retina? The cornea, the pupil, and the lens 17. What is the name of the colored part of the eye? The iris 18. Why do we need to wear glasses as we get older? Because of changes in the lens 19. What is accommodation in sight? The process of the lens flattening for distant objects and becoming more rounded or spherical for closer objects 20. What is the reting? The light-sensitive layer of tissue at the back of the eye that transforms light into neural impulses 21. What are the two types of photoreceptors lining the retina? Rods and cones 22. What are rods? They are the cells of the eye that are responsible for seeing in black and white, that allow vision in dim light 23. What are cones? They are the cells of the eye that are responsible for seeing in color, that allow perception of fine detail 24. If I am driving home in the dark, on what receptors am I relying? The rods in my eyes 25. Which receptors am I using sitting in my backyard on a sunny day? Cones 26. What is the fovea? The center of the retina, which is most sensitive to small detail (it has the highest
concentration of cones) 27. Where is the blind spot in the eye? The point of the retina at which the neurons leave the eye 28. Of dark adaptation, light adaptation and bleaching, which is the fastest event? Bleaching; it is almost instantaneous 29. How long does dark adaptation take? It takes 15 minutes for the rods to adapt 30. Why do pirates wear an eyepatch? It keeps one eye dark adapted 31. What is the significance of the optic chiasm? It is the point where the optic nerve becomes the optic tract 32. Where does the information leaving the eyes first arrive? At the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus 33. I show a ball to someone suffering from blindsight and ask him or her about it. What could happen? They can tell me the shape and whereabouts of the object 34. What is the pathway visual information takes once it has left the eye? Optic chiasm, lateral geniculate nucleus, primary visual cortex 35. What are feature detectors? Neurons that fire only when stimulation in the receptive field matches a particular pattern or orientation 36. What are some types of feature detector identified by Hubel and Wiesel? Simple cells, complex cells, and hypercomplex cells 37. What are the two pathways that come from the primary visual cortex? The what pathway and the where pathway 38. If someone is suffering from prosopagnosia, what can they not do? They cannot recognize familiar faces 39. A baseball fielder must locate the ball after it is hit, follow its movement, and guide their own movement toward the ball to make a catch. What visual pathway must he use? The where pathway 40. If a person draws a clock and fails to include one side of the clock face, such as 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 o'clock, this person must be suffering from what?
Visual neglect 41. If I ask you for the hue of the shirt that you are wearing, what am I asking? For the color of the shirt 42. According to trichromatic theory, the eye contains receptors for which colors? Red, blue, and green 43. What is happening when a child fingerpaints and creates other colors by mixing colors together? Subtractive color mixture 44. What is an example of a stimulus that works on an additive color principle? Television 45. When my Christmas lights overlap, they make different colors. What does this demonstrate? Additive color mixture 46. According to Ewald Hering, what couldn t the trichromatic theory of color perception explain? Afterimages 47. What was the theory of color perception created by Ewald Hering? Opponent process theory 48. What are the 3 antagonistic color systems proposed by Hering? Black-white, red-green, and blue-yellow 49. What are some truths about red-green color blindness? It is sex linked, it may be a result of a deficiency of M cones, and it may be a result of a deficiency in L cones 50. What are some important distinctions between sound and light? Sound travels more slowly than light; sound travels through most objects, but light does not; when sound waves are reflected off or absorbed by objects in the environment, there is a perceptible difference in the quality of the reflected sound 51. What are some truths about sound? Sound loudness is measured in decibels (db); the frequency of a sound is measured in hertz (Hz); and another name for a sound's complexity is timbre 52. What must I use in order for me to tell the difference between my mother's voice and the voice of my girlfriend? Timbre
53. What is the psychological property corresponding to amplitude? Loudness :o 54. What are set in motion when the eardrum vibrates? Ossicles, which begins transduction of sound 55. What are the three bones of the middle ear? The incus, the stapes, and the malleus 56. Where does the transduction of sound occur? In the cochlea 57. If I have a problem hearing due to a problem with the stapes, what kind of hearing loss do I suffer from? Conduction 58. Exposure to extremely loud noises can lead to hearing loss as a result of what? Damage to the hair cells attached to the basilar membrane 59. What is the place theory of hearing? Different areas of the basilar membrane respond to different frequencies 60. Which theory best explains how sound is transduced at low frequencies, and which best explains how sound is transduced at high frequencies? Frequency theory; place theory 61. If an object to my right is producing high frequency sounds, what MUST be true? The sound will be louder in my right ear, and the sound will contact my right ear sooner than my left ear 62. What does olfaction aid in? The awareness of danger; avoiding food poisoning; and recognizing familiar members of the same species 63. What are some important functions of smell? It enables us to detect danger; it helps to discriminate palatable from unpalatable foods; and it helps to recognize familiar odors 64. Where does transduction of smell happen? At the top of the nasal cavities 65. If I am attracted to a woman by smell, what is my state of attraction toward her likely to be based on? The pheromones she emits 66. What are some true statements about olfaction?
The threshold for recognizing odors can be as low as 1 molecule per 50 trillion.; The vapors that give rise to olfactory sensations can enter the nasal cavities through either the nose or mouth; Transduction of smell occurs in the olfactory epithelium. 67. What are papillae? The bumps on your tongue 68. Why is the regeneration of taste receptors essential? Otherwise a burn to the tongue would result in permanent loss of taste 69. What is the pathway for taste that leads to the limbic system responsible for? Learned responses to tastes, such as spitting out food previously associated with nausea 70. What can be said about people who prefer to eat spicy foods.the spicier the better? They are considered non-tasters with two recessive alleles. 71. What are the four basic tastes? Sour, sweet, salty, & bitter 72. What does phantom limb involve? It involves the presence of misleading sensations from missing appendages 73. What are some important functions performed by the skin? Aiding in social interactions; protect the body from injury; and helping to maintain body temperature 74. The sense of touch is actually a mixture of what? Pressure, temperature, and pain 75. What is the primary touch center in the brain? The somatosensory cortex 76. What are some truths about our touch sensations? The most sensitive regions of the body are the face and fingers, while the least sensitive areas are the back and legs; We have one receptor for cold and another for warmth; Free nerve endings and substance P are associated with the perception of pain. 77. What are thought to be the most important receptors for pain? Free nerve endings in the skin 78. What is a useful way of treating or controlling pain? Distraction 79. If a guy loses his arm in an accident and yet truly believes that he can still feel the arm, what might he be experiencing? Phantom limb.
80. Which sense is associated with the position of the body in space and makes use of gravity and movement? The vestibular sense 81. Where are the organs for our vestibular sense believed to be located? In the inner ear 82. What is kinesthesia? Information about the movement and position of my limbs 83. What distinguishes perception from sensation? Organization and interpretation 84. What are sensation and perception? The process by which we gather information from the environment is known as sensation; the process by which we organize and understand that information is known as perception 85. What did the Gestaltists propose? The idea that there are perceptual rules and perceptual organization 86. To what does figure-ground refer? Distinguishing the relevant object from the background sensation 87. If there are 10 basketball players, but you see 2 teams of 5 because of their jerseys, how is this Gestaltist? Because of the principle of similarity 88. What s an example of the Gestaltist principle of continuity? The perception of the letter t'' as two intersecting lines, rather than four nonintersecting lines 89. According to Biederman's recognition-by-components theory, how are incomplete figures recognized? As long as the relationships among geons remains clear 90. How do perceptual illusions result? From perceptual misinterpretation 91. How does retinal disparity work as a cue for depth perception? Because most cells in the primary visual cortex receive information from both eyes 92. What are some monocular cues to depth perception? Interposition, linear perspective, and shading
93. How is motion parallax a useful monocular depth cue? Near objects appear to move more rapidly than do more distant objects 94. If I change my hair, clothing style, and add piercings and tattoos, how would you know it is still me? Because of perceptual constancy 95. According to the theory of direct perception championed by Gibson, what is perception based? Detecting the order that exists in nature 96. Based on the test results of human babies and a variety of animal species on the visual cliff, what did Gibson and Walk conclude? That depth perception is innate 97. What type of processing begins with raw sensory data and builds on that? Bottom-up processing 98. If my perception of a movie is influenced by the reviews that I have heard, what type of processing does this support? Top-down processing 99. According to the authors of your textbook, what does the evidence suggests about processing? Top-down and bottom-up processing occur simultaneously 100. What functions do schema serve? They help us plan our reactions; They make the environment predictable; They anticipate what we will encounter in our environment