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| An object or event in the outside world |
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| The energies from the outside world that directly reach our sense organs |
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| An approach to perception that relates the characteristics of physical stimuli to the sensory experiences they produce |
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| The smallest quantity of a stimulus that an individual can detect |
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| The smallest amount that a given stimulus must be increased or decreased so that an individual can detect the difference |
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| Just-noticeable difference (JND) |
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| The smallest difference than an organism can reliably detect between two stimuli |
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| The observation that the size of the difference threshold is proportional to the intensity of the standard stimulus |
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| The observation that the strength of a sensation is proportional to the logarithm of physical stimulus intensity |
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| An organism's ability to detect a signal |
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| An organism's rule for how much evidence it needs before responding |
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| The theory that perceiving or not perceiving a stimulus is actually a judgment about whether a momentary sensory experience is due to background noise alone of to the background noise plus a signal |
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| The pattern of benefits and costs associated with certain types of responses |
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| The process through which a physical stimulus is converted into a signal within the nervous system |
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| The process through which the nervous system represents the qualities of teh incoming stimulus- whether auditory or visual, for example, or whether a red light or a green one, a sour taste or a sweet taste |
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| The proposal that different sensory qualities are signaled by different quality-specific neurons |
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| The proposal that different sensory qualities are encoded by specific patterns of firing among the relevant neurons |
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| The process by which teh sensitivity to a stimulus declines if the stimulus is presented for an extended period of time |
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| The sensations generated by receptors in teh muscles, tendons, and joints that inform us of our skeletal movement |
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| The sensations generated by receptors in the semicircular canals of the inner ear that inform us about the head's orientation and movements |
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| The group of senses, including pressure, warmth, cold and pain, through which we gain information about our immediate surroundings |
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| Receptors in the skin that give rise to the sense of pain; they respond to various forms of tissue damge and to temperature extremes |
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| The proposal that pain sensations must pass through a neural "gate" in order to reach the brain and can be blocked at that gate by neurons that inhibit signals from the nociceptors |
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| A mucous membrane at the top of the nasal cavity; contains olfactory receptor neurons that respond to airborne molecules called odorants |
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| Sites in the brain's olfactory bulb where signals from the smell receptors converge |
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| Biologically produced odorants that convey information to other members of the species |
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| Structures on the tongue that contain the taste buds, which in turn contain taste receptors |
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| Successive pressure variations in the air that vary in amplitude and wavelength |
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| The height of a wave crest, used as a measure of sound intensity |
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| The number of wave peaks per second. In sound, frequency governs the perceived pitch of the sound |
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| The coiled structure in the inner ear that contains the basilar membrane |
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| The taut membrane that transmits the vibrations caused by sound waves from the auditory canal to the ossicles in the middle ear |
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| The membrane separating the middle ear from the inner ear |
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| The three bones of the middle ear that transmit the vibrations of the eardrum to the oval window |
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| A membrane running the length of the cochlea; sound waves cause a deformation of thsi membrane, bending the hair cells in the cochlea nad thus stimulating the auditory receptors |
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| The auditory receptors in the cochlea, lodged between the basilar membrane and other membranes above |
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| A proposal about pitch perception stating that regions of the basilar membrane respond to particular sound frequencies and the nervous system interprets the excitation from different basilar regions as different pitches |
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| The quality of a sound apart from its pitch or loudness; timbre enables us to distinguish a clarinet from an obe, or one person's voice from another |
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| A light-sensitive cell located on the retina that converts light energy into neural impulses |
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| The image of an object that is projected on the retina. Its size increases with the size of that object and decreases with the objects' distance from the eye |
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| Photoreceptors in the retina that respond to lower light intensities and give rise to achromatic sensations |
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| Visual receptors that respond to greater light intesities and give rise to chromatic sensations |
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| The area roughly at the retina's center where cones are plentiful and visual acuity is greatest |
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| The bundle of fibers that proceeds from each retina to the brain |
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| A chemical in the photoreceptors that changes its formi n response to light, producing an electircal change that signals to the nervous system that light is present |
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| The pattern of interaction among neurons in the visual system in which activity in one neuron inhibits adjacent neurons' responses |
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| Trichromatic color vision |
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| The principle underlying human color vision. Color vision occurs through the operation of three sets of cones, each maximally sensitive to a different wavelength of light |
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| A theory of color vision that proposes three pairs of color antagonists: red-green, blue-yellow, and white-black. Excitation of neurons sensitive to one member of a pair automatically inhibits neurons sensitive to another member |
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| For a particular cell in the visual system, the pattern of retinal stimulation that most effectively causes the cell to fire. For some cells, this pattern is defined simply in terms of a retinal location; for others, the most effective input has a particular shape, color, or direction of motion |
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| Neurons in the retina or brain that respond to specific attributes of the stimulus, such as movement, orientation, and so on |
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| A theoretical approach that emphasizes the role of organized wholes in perception and other psychological processes |
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| In perception, a principle by which we tend to group like figures, especially by color and orientation |
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| The closeness of two figures. The closer together they are, the more we tend to group them together perceptually |
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| A factor in visual grouping; we tend to perceive contours in a way that alters their directions as little as possible |
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| Perceived contours that do not exist physically. We tend to complete figures that have gaps in them by perceiving a contour as continuing along its original path |
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| A visual pattern that easily allows more than one interpretation, in some cases changing the specification of figures and ground, in other cases changing the perceived organization in depth |
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| A task in which participants are asked to determine whether a specified target is present within a field of stimuli |
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| A model of pattern recognition involving a network of detectors and having feature detectors as the network's starting point |
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| Simple geometric figures, such as cubes, cylinders, and pyramids, that can be combined to create all other shapes. An early step in some models of object recognition is determining which geons are present |
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| Ganglion cells that, because of their sensitivity to differences in hue, are particularly suited to perceiving color and form |
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| Ganglion cells that, because of their sensitivity to brightness changes, are particularly suited to perceiving motion and depth |
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| The visual pathway leading from the visual cortex to the temporal lobe; especially involved in identifying objects |
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| The visual pathway leading from the visual cortex to the parietal lobe; especially involved in locating objects in space and coordinating movements |
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| The problem confronted by the brain of recombining the elements of a stimulus, given the fact that these elemetns are initially analyzed separately by different neural systems |
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| The accurate perception of certain attributes of a distal object, such as its shape, size and brightness, despite changes in the proximal stimulus, caused by variations in our viewing circumstances |
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| A process postulated by Hermann von Helmholtz to explain certain perceptual phenomena such as size constancy. |
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| Patterns that can be represented on a flat surface in order to crate a sense of a three-dimenisonal object or scene |
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| A monocular cue to distance that relies on the fact that objects farther away are blocked from view by closer objects |
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| A cue for distance based on the fact that parallel lines seem to converge as they get farther away from the viewer |
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| A depth cue based on the fact that, as an observer moves, the retinal images of nearby objects move more rapidly than do the retinal images of objects farther away |
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| Cell in the visual cortex that are sensitive to an image moving in a particular direction across the retina |
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| The perception of movement produced by stimuli that are stationary but are presented first at one positions and then, at an appropriate time interval, presented at a different position |
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| Perceived movement of a stationary stimulus, usually caused by movement of a surrounding framework or nearby objects |
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| As your view changes, the perceptual task of determining which aspects of the current view correspond to which aspects of the view seen a moment ago |
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| A pattern of errors in which observers correctly perceive the features present in a display, such as color and shape, but misperceive how they were combined. For example, they might report seeing a green O and a red X when a green X and red O were presented |
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| The process through which a detector or proportion of the nervous system is prepared for an upcoming input, making it easier for the participant to recognize that input |
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| Moment-by-moment awareness of ourselves, our thoughts, and our environment |
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| The process of "looking within" to observe one's own thoughts, beliefs, and feelings |
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| The mental support processes outside our awareness that make our perception, memory, and thinking possible |
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| The ability of a person with a lesion in the visual cortex to reach toward or correctly "guess" about objects in the visual field even though the person reports seeing nothing |
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| The difficulty in understanding how the midn and body influence each other- so that physical events can cause mental events, and so that mental events can cause physical ones |
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| Neural correlates of consciousness |
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| Specific brain states that seem to correspond to the content of someone's conscious experience |
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| Global workspace hypothesis |
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| A hypothesis about the neural basis of consciousness. It proposes that specialized neurons, called workspace neurons, give rise to consicousness by allowing us to link stimuli or ideas in dynamic, coherent representations |
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| A pattern of regular pulses between 8 and 12 per second, visible in the EEG of a person who is relaxed by awake and typically has her eyes closed |
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| The rhythmic pattern in the brain's electrical activity often observed when a person is actively thinking about some specific topic |
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| The rhythmic pattern in the brain's electrical activity often observed when a person is in slow-wave sleep |
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| A term used for both stage 3 and 4 of sleep; characterized by slow, rolling eye movements, low cortical arousal, and slowed heart rate and respiration |
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| Sleep characterized by rapid eye movements, EEG patterns similar to wakefulness, speeded heart rate and respiration, near-paralysis of skeletal muscles, and highly visual dreams |
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| Activation-synthesis hypothesis |
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| The hypothesis that dreams may be just a byproduct of the sleeping brain's activities, which are later assembled into a semicoherent narrative |
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| A highly relaxed, suggestible state of mind in which a person is likely to feel that his actions and thoughts are happening to him rather than being produced voluntarily |
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| Drugs that diminish activity levels in the nervous system |
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| Drugs that have activating or excitatory effects on the brain or bodily functions |
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| Drugs that powerfully change perception and can trigger sensory experiences in the absence of any inputs |
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| A consequence of drug dependence that occurs when the drug is witheld, such that the person feels strong drug cravings and psychological and medical distress |
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| The diminished response to a drug that results from extended use, so that over time the user requires larger doses to experience the drug's effects |
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