PSYC51H3 Study Guide - Fall 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Visual Cortex, Cerebral Cortex, Lesion
Document Summary
Light is a stimulus for vision: seeing involves a stimulus (light) and a mechanism (the visual system) Can regard light as both a wave and a particle. Vision is based on visible light, a band of energy within the electromagnetic spectrum. Only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum (when considering the entire spectrum, we are almost blind!) We can detect light between 400 - 700 nm (nm = 1 billionth of a meter) When light travels through a transparent substance (e. g. , glass, water) it is slowed down to a velocity which depends on the refractive index (roughly the density) of the medium it is passing through. This slowing down is extremely important: it causes prisms to bend light and lenses to form images. This paved the way to an understanding of colour vision: light itself is not coloured, but instead elicits colours (the colours being produced by specialized cells in the brain)