Experience Psychology, 3rd edition Essays - Nervous System

Experience Psychology, 3rd edition Essays - Nervous System Experience Psychology, 3rd edition Chapter 3, Sensation and Perception Vocabulary, Key Terms Absolute threshold: The minimum amount of stimulus energy that a person can detect. Apparent movement: The perception that a stationary object is moving. Auditory nerve: The nerve structure that receives information about sound from the hair cells of the inner ear and carries these neural impulses to the brain's auditory areas. Binding: In the sense of vision, the bringing together and integration of what is processed by different neural pathways or cells. Binocular cues: Depth cues that depend on the combination of the images in the left and right eyes and on the way the two eyes work together. Bottom-up processing: The operation in sensation and perception in which sensory receptors register information about the external environment and send it up to the brain for interpretation. Cones: The receptor cells in the retina that allow for color perception. Convergence: A binocular cue to depth and distance in which the muscle movements in an individual's two eyes provide information about how deep and/or far away something is. Depth perception: The ability to perceive objects three-dimensionally. Difference threshold: The degree of difference that must exist between two stimuli before the difference is detected. Executive attention: The ability to plan action, allocate attention to goals, detect errors and compensate for them, monitor progress on tasks, and deal with novel or difficult circumstances. Feature detectors: Neurons in the brain's visual system that respond to particular features of a stimulus. Figure-group relationship: The principle by which we organize the perceptual field into stimuli that stand out (figure) and those that are left over (ground). Frequency theory: Theory of how the inner ear registers the frequency of sound stating that the perception of a sound's frequency depends on how often the auditory nerve fires. Gestalt psychology: A school of thought interested in how people naturally organize their perceptions according to certain patterns. Inner ear: The part of the ear that includes the oval window, cochlea, and basilar membrane and whose function is to convert sound waves into neural impulses and send them to the brain. Kinesthetic senses: Senses that provide information about movement, posture, and orientation. Middle ear: The part of the ear that channels and amplifies sound through the eardrum, hammer, anvil, and stirrup to the inner ear. Monocular cues: Powerful depth cues available from the image in one eye, either the right or the left. Noise: Irrelevant and competing stimuli; not only sounds but also any distracting stimuli for the senses. Olfactory epithelium: The lining of the roof of the nasal cavity, containing a sheet of receptor cells for smell. Opponent-process theory: Theory stating that cells in the visual system respond to complementary pairs of red-green and blue-yellow colors; a given cell might be excited by red and inhibited by green, whereas another cell might be excited by yellow and inhibited by blue. Optic nerve: The structure at the back of the eye made up of axons of the ganglion cells that carries visual information to the brain for further processing. Outer ear: The outermost part of the ear, consisting of the pinna and the external auditory canal. Papillae: Rounded bumps above the tongue's surface that contain the taste buds, the receptors for taste. Parallel processing: The simultaneous distribution of information across different neural pathways. Perception: The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information so that it makes sense. Perceptual constancy: The recognition that objects are constant and unchanging even though sensory input about them is changing. Perceptual set: A predisposition or readiness to perceive something in a particular way. Place theory: Theory on how the inner ear registers the frequency of sound, stating that each frequency produces vibrations at a particular spot on the basilar membrane. Retina: The multilayered light-sensitive surface in the eye that records electromagnetic energy and converts it to neural impulses for processing in the brain. Rods: The receptor cells in the retina that are sensitive to light but not very useful for color vision. Selective attention: The act of focusing on a specific aspect of experience while ignoring others. Semicircular canals: Three fluid-filled circular tubes in the inner ear contain the sensory receptors that detect head motion caused