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Questions and Answers
What is the method that provides a complete picture of sensitivity and is easy to administer?
What is the method that provides a complete picture of sensitivity and is easy to administer?
Method of constant stimuli
Which method is used to get the most complete description of sensitivity?
Which method is used to get the most complete description of sensitivity?
What is a discrimination threshold?
What is a discrimination threshold?
Discrimination threshold is the smallest difference between two stimuli that a person can detect.
What does Weber's law state?
What does Weber's law state?
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What is sensation?
What is sensation?
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What is perception?
What is perception?
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What is transduction?
What is transduction?
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Is sensation a bottom-up process and perception a top-down process?
Is sensation a bottom-up process and perception a top-down process?
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The smallest stimulus level that can just be detected is known as the ________ threshold.
The smallest stimulus level that can just be detected is known as the ________ threshold.
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Study Notes
Sensation and Perception
- Sensation: a physiological process that detects physical energy (e.g., light, sound waves) by sense organs (e.g., eyes, ears), which relay this information to the brain.
- Perception: the selection, organization, and interpretation of sensations, where the brain interprets sensation information to create a meaningful experience.
Muller's Doctrine
- Each sense organ responds to a specific form of energy and translates it into neural firing that the brain can respond to.
Transduction
- The process where sense organs convert energy from environmental events into neural activity through action potentials.
Importance of Perception
- Determines our experience and reaction to the world around us.
- Knowledge can also affect the way we perceive things.
Bottom-up and Top-down Processes
- Sensation: a bottom-up process, transforming energy.
- Perception: a top-down process, interpreting the information.
Studying Perceptual Processes
- Stimulus (distal and proximal; Steps 1-2)
- Physiology (receptors and neural processing; Steps 3-4)
- Behavior (perception, recognition, action; Steps 5-7)
The Stimulus-Behavior Relationship
- Relating stimuli to behavioral responses, such as perception, recognition, and action.
- Examples: psychophysics measures the relationships between the physical stimulus and the behavioral response.
The Stimulus-Physiology Relationship
- Relating stimuli to physiological responses, like neurons firing.
- Examples: measuring brain activity using techniques like optical brain imaging.
The Physiology-Behavior Relationship
- Relating physiological responses to behavioral responses.
- Examples: measuring both brain response and behavioral sensitivity in the same participants.
Psychophysics
- The use of quantitative methods to measure relationships between stimuli (physics) and perception (psycho).
- Quantifying the sensations evoked by physical stimuli.
Components of a Psychophysical Experiment
- Psychophysical stimuli: generated by a computer and presented on a device (e.g., CRT monitor).
- Psychophysical task: the action the observer must perform on each trial (e.g., selecting a stimulus, pressing a button).
- Method: the way the stimuli are presented and the observer's responses are recorded.
- Analysis: how the data are converted into measurements.
- Measure: the result of the analysis (e.g., thresholds, reaction times, proportion correct).
Thresholds
- Detection threshold (Absolute threshold): the smallest detectable stimulus intensity that yields a sensory percept.
- Discrimination threshold (Difference Threshold): the smallest detectable difference between two stimuli that yields a perceptual difference.
Measuring Thresholds
- Method of constant stimuli
- Method of limits
- Method of adjustment (adaptive methods)
Method of Limits
- Presents stimuli in either ascending or descending order.
- Efficient: gets a threshold in a small number of trials.
- Spurious thresholds may be obtained without evidence that the observer was really listening.
Method of Adjustment (Adaptive Methods)
- Subjects adjust stimulus intensity until they can just about detect or discriminate the stimulus.
- Easy and intuitively appealing.
- Produces unreliable results.
Weber's Law
- The just-noticeable difference (JND) is a constant fraction of the stimulus.
- Describes how much of a physical difference is needed between two stimuli before people can just tell the difference.
- Works well except at extremely low or high intensities.
Magnitude Estimation
- The observer assigns numbers to stimuli that are proportional to the perceived magnitude.
- Response compression: as intensity increases, magnitude increases, but not as rapidly.
- Response expansion: as intensity increases, perceptual magnitude increases more than intensity.
Steven's Power Law
- The relationship between the intensity of a stimulus and our perception of its magnitude follows the same general equation for each sense.
- Perceived magnitude, P, equals a constant, K, times the stimulus intensity, S, raised to a power, n.
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Description
This quiz covers the topic of measuring perception in perceptual processes, focusing on photoreceptors, bipolar cells, and ganglion cells. It is part of PSY2204, a psychology course.
