Ch 1 What is perception
Agnosia:
a deficit in some aspect of perception as a result of brain damage
Microelectrode:
a device so small that is can penetrate a single neuron in the mammalian central nervous system without destroying the cell
Weber's law:
a just-noticeable difference between two stimuli is related to the magnitude or strength of the stimuli
fMRI:
a neuroimaging technique that generates an image of the brain on the basis of the blood levels in different areas of the brain, which correlate with activity levels in those regions
Gestalt psychology:
a school of thought claiming that we view the world in terms of general patterns and well-organized structures rather than separable individual elements
Aftereffect:
a sensory experience that occurs after prolonged experience of visual motion in one particular direction
Computational approach:
an approach to the study of perception in which the necessary computations the brain would need to carry out to perceive the world are specified
Stimulus:
an element of the world around us that impinges on our sensory systems
Ecological approach to perception:
another name for the direct perception view
Action:
any motor activity
Size-arrival effect:
bigger approaching objects are seen as being more likely to collide with the viewer than smaller approaching objects
Prosopagnosia:
face agnosia, resulting in a deficit in perceiving faces
Phenomenology:
our subjective experience of perception
Unconscious inference:
perception is not adequately determined by sensory information, so an inference or educated guess is part of the process; this inference is not the result of active problem solving but rather a nonconscious cognitive approach
Receptors:
specialized sensory neurons that covert physical stimuli into neural responses
Neuroimaging:
technologies that allow us to map living intact brains as they engage in ongoing tasks
Direct perception (Gibsonian approach):
the approach to perception that claims that information in the sensory world is complex and abundant, and therefore the perceptual systems need only directly perceive such complexity
Doctrine of specific nerve energies:
the argument that it is the specific neurons that are activated that determines the particular type of experience
Time to collision:
the estimate that an approaching object will contact another
Constructivist approach:
the idea that perceptions are constructed using information from our senses and cognitive processes
Transduction:
the process of converting a physical stimulus into an electrochemical signal
Perception:
the process of creating conscious perceptual experience from sensory input; the translation of the neural signal into usable information
Sensation:
the registering of a physical stimulus on our sensory receptors
Neural response:
the signal produced by receptor cells that can then be sent to the brain
Psychophysics:
the study of the relation between physical stimuli and perception events
Neuropsychology:
the study of the relation of brain damage to changes in behavior
Neuroscience:
the study of the structures and processes in the nervous system and brain
Information-processing approach:
the view that perceptual and cognitive systems can be view as the flow of information from one process to another