AP Psych Notes:Sensation and Perception of the Ear
Sensation: Intro
Sensation is the process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment.
Perception is the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events.
Bottom-up processing is the analysis that begins with the sense receptors and works up to the brain’s integration of sensory information.
Top-down processing is information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawing on our experience and expectations.
Sensing the World: Some Basic Principles
Sensory systems enable organisms to obtain need information
- a frog, feeds on flying insect, has eyes with receptor cells that fire only in a response to small, dark, moving objects
Thresholds
The shades of our senses are open just a crack, allowing us only a restricted awareness of our sea of energy.
Psychophysics is the study of relationships between the physical characteristics of stimuli, such as their intensity, and our psychological experience of them.
Absolute Thresholds
To some kinds of stimuli we are exquisitely sensitive.
Our awareness of faint stimuli (we can smell a single drop of perfume in a 3 bedroom apartment) illustrates our ABSOLUTE THRESHOLDS
Absolute threshold is the minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the time.
Signal Detection
Detects how and when we detect the presence of a faint stimulus(“signal”) amid background stimulation(“noise”). Assumes that there is no single absolute threshold and that detection depends partly on a person’s experience, expectations, motivation, and level of fatigue.
Sublimal Detection
Subliminal is below one’s absolute threshold for conscious awareness rock songs backward, with messages… controversy or satanic messages erotic images in liquor ads do they have extraordinary suggestive powers.
Difference Thresholds
Difference
Sensation is the process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment.
Perception is the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events.
Bottom-up processing is the analysis that begins with the sense receptors and works up to the brain’s integration of sensory information.
Top-down processing is information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawing on our experience and expectations.
Sensing the World: Some Basic Principles
Sensory systems enable organisms to obtain need information
- a frog, feeds on flying insect, has eyes with receptor cells that fire only in a response to small, dark, moving objects
Thresholds
The shades of our senses are open just a crack, allowing us only a restricted awareness of our sea of energy.
Psychophysics is the study of relationships between the physical characteristics of stimuli, such as their intensity, and our psychological experience of them.
Absolute Thresholds
To some kinds of stimuli we are exquisitely sensitive.
Our awareness of faint stimuli (we can smell a single drop of perfume in a 3 bedroom apartment) illustrates our ABSOLUTE THRESHOLDS
Absolute threshold is the minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the time.
Signal Detection
Detects how and when we detect the presence of a faint stimulus(“signal”) amid background stimulation(“noise”). Assumes that there is no single absolute threshold and that detection depends partly on a person’s experience, expectations, motivation, and level of fatigue.
Sublimal Detection
Subliminal is below one’s absolute threshold for conscious awareness rock songs backward, with messages… controversy or satanic messages erotic images in liquor ads do they have extraordinary suggestive powers.
Difference Thresholds
Difference