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GRE® Psychology Biological: Sensation and Perception Part 1
This deck covers key concepts in sensation and perception, focusing on the biological processes involved in how we sense and interpret the world around us.
What is the difference between sensation and perception?
• Sensation is what happens when our sensory modalities (vision, hearing, taste, etc.) are activated. • Perception is how we understand these senses.
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Key Terms
Term
Definition
What is the difference between sensation and perception?
• Sensation is what happens when our sensory modalities (vision, hearing, taste, etc.) are activated. • Perception is how we understand these senses.
What are the three stages of sensation?
1. reception 2. transduction 3. transmission through neural pathways to the brain
Stimuli from the outside world are converted into neural impulses to be processed by our brains through what process?
transduction
What two processes stop you from feeling your shirt press against the hairs on your arms all day?
1. sensory adaptation: when the hairs on our arms are constantly being pressed, we simply stop responding to the feeling of pressure 2. sensory habitu...
If you are zoning out in class and your teacher suddenly uses a swear word, you will snap back to attention. What is the phenomenon called that is responsible for this?
The cocktail party phenomenon/effect involuntarily focuses our attention on something salient, like hearing our name in a roomful of people, or hearin...
What are the “energy senses” and why are they called that?
• vision • audition (hearing) • touch These senses detect stimuli such as light, sound waves, and pressure and convert them into neural signals.
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| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
What is the difference between sensation and perception? | • Sensation is what happens when our sensory modalities (vision, hearing, taste, etc.) are activated. • Perception is how we understand these senses. |
What are the three stages of sensation? | 1. reception 2. transduction 3. transmission through neural pathways to the brain |
Stimuli from the outside world are converted into neural impulses to be processed by our brains through what process? | transduction |
What two processes stop you from feeling your shirt press against the hairs on your arms all day? | 1. sensory adaptation: when the hairs on our arms are constantly being pressed, we simply stop responding to the feeling of pressure 2. sensory habituation: the pressure on our hairs stops being novel, so there is no reason for us to continue paying attention to it |
If you are zoning out in class and your teacher suddenly uses a swear word, you will snap back to attention. What is the phenomenon called that is responsible for this? | The cocktail party phenomenon/effect involuntarily focuses our attention on something salient, like hearing our name in a roomful of people, or hearing a teacher curse. |
What are the “energy senses” and why are they called that? | • vision • audition (hearing) • touch These senses detect stimuli such as light, sound waves, and pressure and convert them into neural signals. |
What are the “chemical senses” and why are they called that? | • taste (gustation) • smell (olfaction) These senses take stimuli and convert them into chemical signals to be processed. |
What is a human’s dominant sense? | vision |
What are the factors in seeing a bright light or a blue sky versus a black jacket? | Light intensity will affect how bright an object appears, and color or hue is affected by the light wavelength in the visual color spectrum an object reflects. Objects that appear black actually absorb all colors, while objects that are white reflect all light wavelengths. The blue sky absorbs all colors but blue, which it reflects. |
Describe the part of the eye: cornea | It is the protective covering of the eye, where light first enters and is focused. |
Describe the part of the eye: pupil | The black part in the middle of the eye, the pupil acts like the shutter of a camera, and is controlled by the iris. |
Describe the part of the eye: iris | The iris is the colored disc surrounding the pupil that changes its dilation, allowing more or less light in. |
Describe the part of the eye: lens | It focuses on light entering through the pupil (called accomodation), then flips and inverts the image and projects it onto the retina. |
Describe the part of the eye: retina | The upside-down and inverted image is projected onto the retina, where neurons are activated to interpret the image via transduction. The retina has several layers of cells involved in transduction. |
What are the parts of the retina? | • rods and cones • fovea • ganglion cells • blind spot |
When the sun sets and everything in the dark around you looks bluish, are your rods or your cones activated? | Rods are activated. Rods react to light, rather than color, with the exception of blue, which explains why we can only see shades of blue in the dark. Cones are activated by other colors. |
Describe the part of the eye: fovea | It is an indentation in the retina. It is the eye’s fixation point, or the part of the eye used when attending to detail. |
What anatomical feature of the eye causes the blind spot? | The optic disc, where the optic nerve exits the retina; it forms a blind spot because the area has no photoreceptors. |
The optic nerve is comprised of axons from which cells? | ganglion cells |
What is the lateral geniculate nucleus? (LGN) | It is the visual part of the thalamus that receives information from the optic nerve. |