| A | B |
|---|
| Perception | process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting sensory data. |
| Psychophysics | comparing events with our psychological experience of them. |
| Absolute threshold | smallest amount of a stimulus we can detect. |
| Difference threshold | minimal difference needed to detect a stimulus change; also called the noticeable difference. |
| Sensation | process of receiving, translating, and transmitting raw sensory information from the external and internal environment to the brain. |
| Receptors | an organ or cell able to respond to light, heat, or other external stimulus and transmit a signal to a sensory nerve |
| Transduction | converts sensory stimuli into neural impulses |
| Coding | converts particular sensory stimuli into specific sensations. |
| Sensory Reduction | filtering incoming sensations before sending neural impulse to the brain.the |
| Feature Detectors | specialized neurons that respond to only certain sensory information. |
| Attenuation Theory | holds that even weakly processed information is given space in memory, even when attention is directed 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. ____________ processing is a cognitive process that initiates with our thoughts, which flow down to lower-level functions, such as the senses (uses the central executive ---working memory) |
| Holistic | thinking involves understanding a system by sensing its large-scale patterns and reacting to them. |
| Analytic | thinking involves understanding a system by thinking about its parts and how they work together to produce larger-scale effects. |
| Synesthesia | A condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color. |
| Bottom-up Processing | is also known as "small chunk" processing and suggests that we attend to or perceive elements by starting with the smaller, more fine details of that element and then building upward until we have a solid representation of it in our minds. |
