PSYC 111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Visual Cortex, Sound, Thalamus
6 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
Sensation and perception are actually parts of one continuous process. Sensation is the process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receives and represents stimulus energies from our environment: bottom up processing: we use our senses to interpret the information. Perception is the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events: top-down expectation: information processing guided by our experience and expectations. Our senses perform these 3 basic steps: receive sensory info, transform that stimulation into neural impulses, deliver the neural information into our brain. Transduction: the chemical process of converting one form of energy into another that our brain can use. Psychophysics is the study of how the physical energy we detect effects our psychological experiences. In studying our awareness of stimuli, gustav fechner identified an absolute threshold as the minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the time. Subliminal input: below the absolute threshold of conscious awareness.
