Sensation and Perception Sensation The process by which our sense receptors and nervous system receive stimuli from the outside world What is actually there the raw data Perception How our brain interprets that information Organizing and interpreting the data that we get form stimuli It doesn t matter if something we touch hurts us if it doesn t hurt us Bottom Up The brain functions in two different methods simultaneously This is taking all of the raw data that enter our system processing it in our brain and then deciding what it means Making sense out of the raw data Like a science lab Left brained logical is bottom up Top Down By looking at the big picture and for supporting evidence Works like a history essay my thesis is this how do I prove it Look at the big picture then the information separately Creative right brained prefers top down Selective Attention Our brain is limited there are 11 million stimuli impacting our brain at any given second yet we can only pay attention to a certain amount of them Our brain is possible of tracking 40 things at the same time out of 11 million The brain is constantly trying to take shortcuts Reticular formation play a big part in this The brain uses selective attention focusing our conscious attention on a specific stimulus When we do this we are good at focusing our attention on that one stimulus so we often miss seemingly obvious things A conscious attention something you have control over People with ADHD have a harder time maintaining their selective attention Cocktail Party Effect If you are in a conversation with someone and across the room someone says your name that conversation becomes irrelevant and you begin to focus on where your name came from Inattention Blindness We are blinded to other things that happen outside of our selective attention A distraction can cause us to miss out on something we wanted to pay attention to Sometimes a stimulus is too overwhelming that we have to drop everything else Like when someone fires a gun in the hallway at school or someone naked walks into the room screaming Psychometrics Psychometrics is the study of the relationship between the physical characteristics of a stimuli and our psychological connection to our experiences How a stimulus affects us psychologically Absolute Threshold The minimal standard for a human to detect a stimuli more than 50 of the time There is nothing you can do to hear the sound anymore All human sensation reaches a point to which we cannot experience it the brain does not pick it up The human absolute threshold for sight is your ability to go up a mountain on a dark cloudless night and see a single candle burning on a mountain top 30 miles away if it is the only light source Signal Detection Theory Human abilities do not allow us to detect certain stimuli This is a way of vocalizing or predicting what happens when we detect a stimuli If there is a signal out there and we pick it up we call that a hit If there is a sound in the environment we hear we have hit that stimuli If that stimuli is out there but you do not hear it it is a miss If there is an absence of a sound no stimuli we call it a correct rejection if we do not hear it We are correct to hear that there is nothing there However if there is no stimuli and someone detects it anyways it is a false alarm Subliminal Below our threshold for conscious awareness A stimulus that we cannot detect consciously even though it is happening We can however detect it unconsciously Priming Telling someone to look for a specific message we are really good at finding it An example of this is the backwards lyrics to songs Played backwards it sounds inaudible but after being primed with fake lyrics we can hear it within the song Difference Threshold The part where we are capable of noticing difference between two stimuli and distinguishing them as different Telling the difference between two stimuli red or blue Needs to be identifiable more than 50 of the time How do we experience it There is a constant percentage for each stimuli by which we can tell the difference Weight is 2 light is 8 touch is 0 3 Weber s Law Mathematical formula that helps us prove that something is outside of the difference threshold Meaning that we would notice the difference being higher than the percentage given and we are able to tell the difference Things fall within a constant percentage and things that do not are noticeable Sensory Adaptation We have limited capabilities one of the ways we are able to observe this is through sensory adaptation Your senses adjusting to a constant stimuli If something is always there you do not need to constantly be aware of it If we have a constant exposure to a stimuli we are likely to not notice it after a while if it is not seen as a threat to us Vision Transduction When looking at sensory adaptation one sense does not get affected Your field of vision is always changing by blinking so the brain never gets used to something enough to tune it out Vision helps streamline our thought process not wasting time on things that isn t important Our vision is based on our ability to transform light energy into usable neural information Somehow our eyes are able to look at the world take out electromagnetic information and transform it into sight Spectrum of Electromagnetic Consists of waves from gamma waves to radio waves And in the middle is visible light We see a small portion of the spectrum within in are all the colors that we know Visible Light As we look at visible light it is that tiny chunk of the spectrum that allows us to see We are able to transduce these waves into usable information Wavelength One of the two physical attributes waves have The measure of a wave from peak to peak or trough to trough how long it takes a wave to go a complete cycle Hue Wavelength transfers into hue which is how we determine color Waves with a shorter wavelength are more blue or violet longer wavelengths are more towards reds oranges and yellows Amplitude How tall the wave is measured vertically from trough to peak The brightness a higher wavelength is bigger the smaller the wavelength the duller it will be Color What is reflecting back is any colors not absorbed by what is there If I have a red light and shined it on a red gummy bear it would be reflected because red is not absorbed by the red gummy bear But a green gummy bear is not being absorbed Red is every color except red because the light is being absorbed but only the
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