PSY-1200 Chapter Notes -Gustav Fechner, Absolute Threshold, Neural Adaptation
Document Summary
Sensation: the process of detecting environmental stimuli or stimuli arising from the body. Sensory systems have been shaped by natural selection to provide information that enhances survival. Perception: the process of interpreting sensory information. Stimulus: anything that elicits a reaction from our sensory systems. Transduction: the translation of incoming sensory information into neural signals. Often determines which features of the environment in uence our subsequent thoughts and behaviors. Unfamiliar, changing, or high-intensity stimuli often affect our survival and have a high priority for our attention. Sensory adaptation: the tendency to pay less attention to a non-changing source of stimulation. So we use selective attention (focusing on a subset of available information and excluding the rest) Bottom-up processing: perception based on building simple input into more complex processing. Top-down processing: a perceptual process in which memory and other cognitive processes are required for interpreting incoming sensory information.
