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