| A | B |
|---|
| Audition | the sense or act of hearing. |
| Frequency | the number of complete wavelengths that pass a point in a given time (i.e. per second). |
| Pitch | a tone’s experienced highness or lowness; depends on frequency. |
| Middle Ear | the chamber between the eardrum and cochlea containing three tiny bones (hammer, anvil, and stirrup) that concentrate the vibrations of the eardrum on the cochlea’s oval window. |
| Cochlea | a coiled, bony, fluid-filled tube in the inner ear through which sound waves trigger nerve impulses. |
| Inner ear | the part of the ear, containing the cochlea, semicircular canals, and vestibular sacs. |
| Place theory | the belief that links the pitch we hear with the location where the cochlea’s membrane is stimulated when the sound was heard. |
| Frequency theory | the belief that the rate of nerve impulses traveling up the auditory nerve matches the frequency of a tone, thus enabling us to sense its pitch. |
| Conduction hearing loss | hearing impairment caused by damage to the mechanical system that conducts sound waves to the cochlea. |
| Sensorineural hearing loss | hearing impairment caused by damage to the cochlea’s receptor cells or to the auditory nerves; also called nerve deafness. |
| Cochlea implant | a device for converting sounds into electrical signals and stimulating the auditory nerve through electrodes threaded into the bony, fluid-filled tube in the inner ear. |
| Kinethesis | the system for sensing the position and movement of individual body parts. |
| Vestibular sense | body movement and position, including the balance. |
| Gate-control theory | the idea that the spinal cord contains a neurological blocks for pain signals or allows them to pass on to the brain. |
| Sensory interaction | the principle that one sense may influence another, as when the smell of food influences its taste. |
| Gestalt | an organized whole; tendency to integrate pieces of information into meaningful wholes. |
| Figure-ground | the organization of the visual field into objects that stand out from their surroundings. |
| Grouping | the perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into coherent sets. |
| Depth perception | the ability to see objects in three dimensions although the images that strike the retina are two-dimensional; allows us to judge distance. |
| Visual cliff | a laboratory device for testing depth perception in infants and young animals. |
| Binocular cues | depth clues, such as retinal disparity, that depend on the use of two eyes. |
| Retinal disparity | a binocular cue for perceiving depth. By comparing images from the retinas in the two eyes, the brain computes distance – the greater the difference between the two images, the closer the object. |
| Monocular cues | depth clues, such as interposition and linear perspective, available to either eye alone. |
| Phi phenomenon | an illusion of movement created when two or more adjacent lights blink on and off in quick succession. |
| Perceptual constancy | perceiving objects as unchanging (having consistent shapes, size, lightness, and color) even as illumination and retinal images change. |
| Color constancy | perceiving familiar objects as having consistent color, even if changing illumination alters the wavelengths reflected by the object. |
| Perceptual adaptation | the ability to adjust to an artificially displaced or even inverted visual field. |
| Perceptual set | a mental disposition to perceive one thing and not another. |
| Extrasensory perception (ESP) | the controversial claim that what is perceived can occur apart from sensory input; includes telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. |
| Parapsychology | the study of psychological phenomena that lies outside the realm of scientific explanation, including ESP and psychokinesis. |
