Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Far-Sightedness, Stimulus Modality, Absolute Threshold

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Dr.Mike

Document Summary

The neural connections that occurs in infancy has not been cut. There is a deficit in neural inhibitory processes in the brain that ordinarily keep input from one sensory modality from going into another. Sensation is the stimulus-detection process where our sense organs respond to and translate environmental stimuli into nerve impulses that are sent to the brain. Perception makes sense of what our senses tells us. Actively organizes the stimulus inputs and gives it meaning. Every species have different stimuli that they are sensitive to. Once they receive that stimuli, they go through transduction (the process whereby the characteristics of a stimulus are converted into nerve impulses) Study of psychophysics studies relations between the physical characteristics of stimuli and sensory capabilities. Concerned with two different kids of sensitivity. The absolute threshold is the lowest intensity at which a stimulus can be detected correctly. Therefore the lower the absolute threshold, the higher the sensitivity.