PSY 200 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Umami, Color Vision, Color Constancy
Document Summary
Threshold: amount of stimulation needed to detect a stimulus or detect that the stimulus has changed. Absolute threshold: the lowest level of energy required by an external stimulus to be detectable by the human senses. Attention serves as the link between sensation, perception, and our experiences. Use attention to determine what to focus on and what to disregard. Filter that blocks certain information from reaching awareness. Failure to notice a stimulus bc attention is focused elsewhere. Top-down processing refers to how our brains make use of information that has already been brought into the brain by one or more of the sensory systems. Cognitive process that initiates with our thoughts, which flow down to lower-level functions, such as the senses. Begin with small sensory units (features) and build upwards toward a complete perception. Whole of a perception is greater than the sum of it parts. Proposed perceptual laws to explain how we organize sensory information.
