Chapter 3

• We will look at the systems that receive sensory information about vision, hearing, taste, smell, body position, and movement.
• We look at how we process information to bring meaning to it.
• The meaning varies according to experience and culture.

• People see a woman trying to escape from her husband.

• The problem is related to how we experience and understand our world.

• Information can be transmitted to the brain when the receptors are stimulated.
• Neural impulses to the brain aren't enough to give us an understanding of our surroundings.

• Without stimulation from the environment or being unable to process the information they receive, no information is transmitted to the brain and perception does not occur.

• It sounds simple--activate the receptors and then send the information to the brain to make sense of it.

• Write the words of light and sound waves and those of smell and taste on one side and the definitions on the other must be changed.
• This is the process of converting something to something else.

• Sound waves can cause hairs in your inner ear to bend.
• These hairs are used for hearing.

• Hearing information can be sent to your brain.

• When a sewer is blocked, adaptation is highly desirable.
• When preparing dinner for friends, adaptation may be disadvantageous.
• Think back to the beginning of the chapter.

• Your repeated tastings have caused your receptors to adapt, so more spices are required to make them work.
• Adding spices may cause a bigger problem than you think.

• A group of German psychophysicists was studying the relation between stimuli and the participant's experience at the same time that Wilhelm could be used by the nervous system.

• The individual was asked to Loss of sensitivity to a stimuli when only one was presented or if the other one was different from the other one.
• They looked at the relation between the mind and the body.

• Weber wanted to determine the smallest difference between two stimuli.
• The constant is the same for all tests of the same sense, but it varies from one sense to another.
• The constant for seeing changes in vision is 8% while the constant for hearing changes is 5%.
• You wouldn't be able to differentiate 95 watt and 100 watt, or 100 watt and 105 watt, but you could differentiate 95 watt and 105 watt.

• Weber showed that the amount of stimulation needed to notice a change, divided by the original stimulation, was a constant.

• Researchers have treated psychophysical laws as if they applied to both stimuli.

• Gustav Fechner refined and expanded Weber's work through his study of sensory thresh olds.
• Historians of psychology believe Fech ner is the originator of modern psychology because of his extensive research on psychophysics.
• The absolute threshold and differential threshold were studied by Fechner.
• The absolute threshold for each of our senses is very low.

• A psychophysicist studying the differential threshold might observe how much the intensity of a light or tone must be increased for a participant to notice the change.

• When you were trying to decide how much spice should be added, you were dealing with a differential threshold problem.

• The research on the absolute and differential thresholds failed to take into account two factors: the condition under which the stimuli were perceived and the nature of the perceiver.
• Thresholds are determined by both factors.
• The task of determining the absolute threshold for a light is more difficult in a brightly lit room than it is in a dark room.
• There are many signal detection problems in everyday life.

• The detection of the signal is influenced by the importance of detecting it.
• Hearing the phone ring is very important if you are waiting for a call telling you that your car is ready.
• As long as you answer the phone when the repair shop calls, you can make a few mistakes.
• A radar operator who is monitoring incoming enemy aircraft cannot afford to make any false-positive mis takes; such errors would result in a full-scale alert and the deployment of many personnel.

• The radar operator can't afford to miss any enemy air craft.
• Loss of life and property can be caused by such errors.

• The study raises an interesting question.

• If a persuasive message could arouse our unconscious motives, it might stand a better chance of succeeding, because we wouldn't try to resist it.
• The use of subliminal perception in advertising is based on this premise.

• Some researchers believe that the nature of the stimuli may affect our behavior.

• The interval is too short for conscious Stimuli that are below the threshold awareness, so people wouldn't have seen the ads.
• The sales of popcorn and soft drink were said to have risen dramatically.

• Data was never presented despite the claim of success for subliminal perception.
• The studies that were adequately controlled failed to reproduce the results.

• In the pop corn and soft drink example, there is some evidence that repeated subliminal presentations may change our attitudes and opinions.
• Researchers reported that participants who had 25 repeated subliminal exposures to novel and ambiguous visual stimuli rated their mood more positively than participants who only had one sub liminal exposure.
• In an intriguing experiment, psychology graduate students were asked to come up with ideas for research projects.
• Some students were exposed to very brief flashes of either the smiling face of a familiar colleague or the scowling face of their faculty supervisor.
• Students who were exposed to the scowling faces of their supervisors gave lower ratings to their own research ideas than students who were not.
• It appears that subliminal stimuli can have an effect on our reactions.

• We can now see how our sensory systems work with this general information about sensation, perception, and the methods of psychophysics in mind.

• If you watch other people a lot, you will see that they blink frequently.
• The blink rate goes up when the air is dry.

• Vision is the most valued sense according to many people.

• Ask several people which sense they would least be willing to lose, and almost all of them will say vision.
• We fear being blind because we are mostly visual creatures.
• Our brain is more focused on vision than it is on hearing, taste, or smell.

• If you lost your sense of smell, you would have to make some adjustments.
• It is not surprising that vision has been studied the most thoroughly, given the importance of vision and the ease with which the eyes can be stud ied.

• The vIsual stImulus is what we see.
• Vision involves the recep tion of waves by visual cells.
• Waves that vary greatly in length are where this kind of energy travels.
• Some of the waves involved in broadcasting are miles long.

• The red light wavelength is associated with different colors.
• We can see a wavelength of violet and a wavelength of red.

• Light waves can be different in two ways: amplitude and saturation.
• The more saturated a color is, the more likely you are to see only one wavelength.

• To understand the concept of saturation, we need to distinguish between the two light sources.
• The sun, light bulbs, and other hot, energy-releasing objects are the only sources of radiant energy.

• You can see in the picture that it's bright for visual stimuli.
• You will see white if you add a blue light to the green mixture.

• You see the colors of grass, a rose, and your energy reflected by objects sweater as a direct result of the light reflected from those objects.

• Adding all wavelength of mixing.

• There are red and green lights.

• Black yellow and blue paint combine to form a dark or black color.

• Think about how the reflection of different wavelength can be made possible.

• Before you read further, write down your suggestions.

• Knowing that objects absorb light waves in addition to reflecting them should help you avoid the reflection of different colors.
• The object or surface appears black if all of the light waves are absorbed, and white if all of the light waves are reflected.
• When certain wavelengths are reflected, we can see colors.

• The color you see is pure if the surface reflects only one wavelength.

• A complex chain of events is involved in vision.

• Light waves travel through the eye and we trace how light waves travel through the muscles.

• The light waves are focused by the cornea.

• The fluid that is recycled supplies sustenance to the eye.
• The light waves travel through a small opening in the middle of the iris.
• The iris has two muscles, one that makes it close and the other that makes it dilate or open.
• The amount of light that enters the eye is regulated by the iris.

• The vitreous humor gives shape to the eye.

• The three major layers are the ganglion cell layer, the bipolar cell layer and the photoreceptor layer.

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• The cells transmit information to each other.

• The eye is seen as sight.

• Light waves cause the nerve endings to change.
• The axons of the cells come together to form the nerve, which carries visual information to higher brain centers.

• The only way the receptors can be positioned close to the blood supply that lies behind the retina is through the arrangement.

• At the point where the axons of the cells come together, there is no way to detect them.

• We suggested at the beginning of this section that blinking may have more to do with sensation than just keeping the eyes moist.
• Light doesn't enter your visual system when you blink.
• Each minute, you should experience 15 or more brief visual black outs because no light is being processed during a blink.
• Before reading further, write down some possible reasons.

• The book is in front of you.

• Gradual moved the book towards you.

• When the brain signals the eyelids to close in a blink, it also stops activity in the visual system.

• The visual system works normally when the blink is complete.

• Information about visual blackouts is not transmitted or processed.
• We remember the object and don't notice the blinks.

• The pathway taken by the brain is shown in Figure 3-6.
• The fibers from the side of the eye closest to the nose cross to the other side.
• In color processing, the LGN is very important.
• Higher-level visual processing begins in the occipital lobes of the cortex, where the visual information is received.

• The rods and cones are so important to what we see that they deserve special attention.
• They do not detect color and have a lower threshold than cones.
• Light strikes the rods and cones and causes a different brain chemical reaction.

• The visual cells send a message to the brain.

• If you're not sure, consider this analogy: Suppose you're having a one-on-one discussion with a friend about the next psychology test, and you're not having a rod discussion.
• Each of you knows what the other is talking about.
• It is clear and direct, like the information sent by the able to detect color cones to the bipolar cells.

• Because of the size of the class, you can't tell who is talking at a given moment.

• A path is taken from the eye to the brain.

• If you want to see the difference in acuity between the rods and cones, hold the book close to your face and look at it.

• The letters to the left and right are hard to read.
• Give the situation some thought, and then write down your thoughts in a notebook.

• The letters are not focused on the same areas of the eye.
• The cone-rich fovea is the focus of the target letter, whereas the letters to the left and right are focused on areas of the retina.
• Rods are the most popular in these areas.
• The image becomes blurry due to the lowered acuity of the rods.
• To focus the print on the cones in the fovea is why you hold the apartment lease in front of your eyes.

• Rods have a lower threshold than cones, so less light is required to awaken them, and cones are used for color vision.

• The threshold for activation 2 should be lower.
• A higher threshold is needed for activation 3.

• Do not process color 4 if you have higher acuity.
• You can only see black, white, and gray on the rose levels.
• You should be able to watch objects lose their color as we gradually use our high levels of illumination.
• Figure 3-7 can be used to see color.

• Researchers have known for a long time that the sensation of to rod vision and cannot see color is transmitted to the brain by the cones in the retina.
• Our progress toward understanding this process has been guided by two theories that were originally proposed in a room in the 1800s.
• Young and Helmholtz believed that there are three types of turn the intensity of the lights cones, each maximally responding to one of three wavelength: short, medium, and down.
• The to rod can be seen according to the trichromatic vision.

• There is support for this theory.
• Three types of cones in the retina are sensitive to one of the primary colors.
• There are three types of cones that are maximally sensitive to certain wavelengths.

• Researchers didn't think about the existence of three types of cones for several years after they were verified.
• Support for another theory of color vision has been provided by continued research.
• The operation of one member of a pair directly affects the operation of the other member.

• The opponent-process theory was abandoned when the trichromatic theory was verified.
• These cells are not cones, but they are located outside of the retina.

• The opponent-process theory states that constant viewing of red weakens the ability to inhibit green.
• Context plays an important role in the colors we see.

• Monochromats have only one type of cone, so the brain ignores all received light waves as the same, and only shades of gray are seen.

• It's possible to experience what it's like to be a monochromat.
• The rods only process shades of gray.
• If you can't see color in dim light, you will know how monochromats see the world.

• A monochromat can be described as color-blind.

• People with a deficiency in color are called dichromats.

• A person who only sees shades has trouble with the opponent-process function because they lack one type of cone.

• The person sees shades of gray and blues and yellows if the deficiency involves a red or green cone.

• Special tests have been developed to evaluate color de Person who has trouble seeing one ficiencies; the most common test is called the Ishihara Test, in which you try to detect the primary colors (red, blue, or a hidden pattern of different-colored circles).

• Difficulty distinguishing reds and greens is the most common type of color deficiency, followed by difficulty distinguishing blues and yellows.

• Color deficien cies probably have a genetic or hereditary basis because there are more males than females.
• Women are most likely carriers of the color deficient gene.
• Although most cases of color deficiency are inherited, it is possible to get color deficiency due to injury to the eye.
• Diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and multiplesclerosis are some of the diseases that may cause color deficiency.
• Drugs for treating heart problems, high blood pressure, infections, and psychological problems can affect color vision.
• A change in the lens of the eye can lead to an acquired color deficiency.
• The lens becomes yellow as we grow older and loses some of it's ability to filter short wavelength light.
• This change can cause confusion between greens and blues.
• Color confusion can be life threatening for elderly people who have to deal with colored medicine pills.

• Psychophysicists such as ernst Weber and Gustav Fech studied the relationship between the mind and the body.

• The waves are light.

• Information related to cal is received by which sensory receptors.

• He only sees bright colors.

• He can't differentiate colors.

• He likes one color over the others.

• He can only pay attention to one thing at a time.

• Sound waves are the same as light waves.
• The section explores what we hear and how we hear it.

• The audItory stimulus is what we hear.
• We need to answer that question.
• The movements of air molecule make up sound waves when objects vibrate.

• Shorter wavelength occur more frequently than longer wavelength.

• Sense of hearing.

• The inten Unit of measure is affected by the sound wave's height in cycles per sity.
• A sound CD player's volume control adjusts the intensity of the sound you hear.

• The Decibel level is the amount of measure of the amount of energy producing the pressure of the vibrations we perceive as sound.

• We don't hear one pure tone at a time, just as we don't see pure colors.

• Consider the variety of sounds you hear on the radio.

• A limited range of sound waves are sensitive to the auditory receptors.
• We hear sounds between 20 and 20,000 Hz.
• We don't hear all sounds the same.
• If we want to hear tones at lower and higher frequencies, we need greater inten sity.

• The range of sound we can make from the outer ability suggests an intricate system.

• When the nerve impulses reach the temporal cortex, they are interpreted as sounds.

• The brain has the auditory nerve.

• The 3 is caused by the vibrating eardrum.
• The bones of the middle ear are set by the moving fluid and they have to strike each other.

• The hammer, anvil, and stirrup in the middle ear are activated by sound waves.

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• The fluid in the cochlea is set in motion when the window vibrates.

• The hair cells are part of the ear.
• Contact with the inner ear's bicyle causes it to bend, when it does, they depolarize.
• The neurons that syn apse with them to fire are caused by sufficient depolarization of the auditory receptors.
• The auditory nerve travels from the cochlea to the medulla.
• The fibers don't cross.
• The cor theory states that the basilar tex is used for processing.

• There are two theories about how we hear different pitches.
• The basilar the organ of Corti transmit information about different pitches according to the theory stated by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1863.
• The perception of different cies is created by the perception of higher frequen, whereas the perception of lower pitches is created by the perception of lower frequencies.
• The basilar is supposed to vibrate in an un even manner for this theory to be correct.
• The basilar membrane is thin near the window, but becomes thicker as time goes on (von Bekesy, 1956).

• According to Rutherford, we can perceive pitch by how quickly the basilar vibrates.
• The theory works well with frequencies up to 100 hertz, but not with more than 100 times per second.
• According to this view, at frequencies above 100 hertz, the brain does not all fire at the same time.
• For a 300-Hz tone, one group would fire at 100 Hz, followed by a second group that also fired at the next interval, and then a third group that fired at the next interval.

• The three groups of neurons that were activated would tell the nervous system what you had heard.

• An important attribute is the ability to discriminate.
• Our ability to locate sound in space is equally important.
• If we couldn't tell where sounds were coming from, driving would be a nightmare, we couldn't tell which people were talking to us, and it would be hard to find a lost child.

• The source of a sound can be found through two mechanisms.
• Certain sounds are blocked by the head.
• The sound waves coming from the opposite side of the body are a bit weaker because the head partially blocks them.
• If someone on your right side is talking to you, the sounds of their speech enter your right ear.
• The sounds enter your left ear before your head blocks them.

• Time delay in neural processing is a second mechanism.
• The difference in time between when a sound enters one ear and when it enters the other is related to the brain processes associated with transmission.
• It is enough time for your brain to process and help you locate to the inner ear, even if it is deafness caused by damage only a few milliseconds.

• You can review facts about deafness caused by light and sound waves.

• Loud noises from rock concerts, jet planes, sirens, and air hammers can cause hearing damage, according to reports in the media.
• Most people want to know if these claims are true.
• There are damage-risk comparisons in Table 3-4.

• Hearing loss can be caused by exposure to sounds with intensities greater than 70 decibels.
• Exposure time needed to produce damage decreases as decibel level increases.
• The shorter the exposure time before your hearing is damaged, the louder the sound.
• The loud noise from a car stereo that has an added bass box to increase the power, or standing near the speakers in a club or at a concert, can cause other problems of a medical nature.

• The extent of exposure to potentially dangerous sounds is within your control.

• Approximately 1% of people suffer total deafness, and 250 million people suffer from some form of disabling hearing impairment.
• Exposure to loud noises may cause the first two.
• Damage to the hammer, anvil, or stirrup can be caused by excessive earwax or exposure to loud noises that can cause the eardrum to burst.
• This type of deafness can be caused by noise that is loud enough to cause hair cells to break.

• Hearing aids can be used to offset hearing loss caused by damage to the bones of the middle ear.

• There is no way to restore hearing when there is sensorineural or central deafness.

• The smell and taste of a liquid and air are related.

• Our knowledge of the sense of taste is not as complete as it could be due to the fact that tasting typically does not occur without smelling and other sensory input.

• What we like to eat is the gustatory stimulus.
• The mole cules are dissolved in a liquid.
• You know the source of the saliva when you eat dry foods.

• The first few bites are likely to be bland and dry, but when your saliva starts flowing, the full flavor of the food comes through.

• Each taste bud has between 50 and 100 taste buds.
• Some of the taste buds can be found in the back of your throat, on the roof of your mouth, and inside your cheeks.
• Being a supertaster can have drawbacks as well as benefits.
• Supertasters don't like strong-flavor foods and beverages.
• Supertasters have better cholesterol profiles and tend to be slimmer.

• The number of taste buds increases as a child gets older.
• Our sense of taste goes down as we get older.

• The most credible theories suggest that the solution may attach to or fit into the receptor sites.
• The microvilli membranes are sensitive to taste.
• The basic tastes are sweet, sour, metallic, bitter, salty, and fat.

• The basic tastes theory makes sense, but there may be a problem.
• Write down some possible answers.

• A second taste could be represented by high activity levels of only two types of receptors, whereas a single taste could be represented by high activity levels of all of them.
• It has been determined that taste perception may be more complicated than previously thought.
• It appears that the perception of a salty taste may be due to changes in the concentration of sodium ion in the saliva.

• The nucleus in the medulla in the hindbrain is where the gustatory nerve goes from the taste buds.
• The information travels from the midbrain to the primary gustatory cortex in the forebrain.
• You can determine the nature of the taste at this point.
• The taste that we experience is determined by two factors, one of which is the pattern of firing across the taste neurons that travel to the cortex.
• Our taste experience can be affected by the nature and amount of brain activity.
• Wine tast ers show a burst of electrical activity in brain areas that deal with memory and emotional responses that normal people don't show.
• When tasting wine, the sommeliers are likely to have a more elaborate experience.

• Humans have learned to like many different tastes.
• Different food sources in different locations and countries have led to cultural and ethnic differences.
• Many people eat insects and animals.
• "Diversity is our delight.

• Taking certain medications can change our taste.
• Changes in taste perception are listed as side effects for 70% of drugs prescribed for high cholesterol, and over one-third of drugs prescribed for hypertension.

• Sense of smell but certain odors are important.

• If we could not smell anything, our world would seem bland.
• Many animals, such as bloodhounds, can detect and discriminate among many more odors.

• The smell is of the olFaCtory stImulus.
• Molecules in the air produce odors.
• The easier it is for a substance to mix with the air, the easier it is for us to smell it.
• It is easy to detect gasoline and glass molecule mix with air.
• Some people can't describe the smell of glass or common odors.
• More than 2 million Americans don't have the ability to smell.

• The most common cause is head trauma, which can shear off axons that run from the olfactory nerves to the brain.
• Specific olfactory deficits may be characteristic of specific disorders.
• People with Parkinson's disease can't identify the odors of pizza, clove, and wintergreen, whereas people with schizophrenia can.

• Olfaction has not received the same amount of research attention as vision and hearing.
• It is difficult to look at the olfactory receptors directly.
• The function of the nose is to collect and filter the air we breathe.

• There is a thin layer of mucus.
• The mucous layer helps bind olfactory stimuli.
• The olfactory stimuli are broken down because of the mucus.

• The olfactory bulb emits 2 gasses.

• These impulses to the temporal of the olfactory receptors are carried by nerve impulses to the olfactory bulb.

• The cells in the nose are high in Cilia from the flower.

• The olfactory receptors are dying and being replaced.
• The lifespan of an olfactoryreceptor is between five and eight weeks.

• Humans have between 300 and 500 types of olfactory receptors, while mice have as many as 1,000.
• Families of different types cluster together.
• A message is sent to the brain when air molecule enter a receptor site.
• The other senses take a different route to the brain than the olfac tory nerve does.
• The amygdala is part of the limbic system and is where some of the olfactory nerve fibers go.

• The psyCholoGICal is used to understand olFaCtory proCessInG.
• It is more difficult to tell if an unfamiliar odor is present if it is mixed with another unfamiliar odor than it is if it is mixed with a familiar odor.
• The psychological aspects of olfaction were considered in order to understand the olfactory sense.
• The view of olfactory pro cessing has been modified due to research findings.

• The olfactory system seems to work by comparing patterns of neural activity to patterns in our memories.
• We can smell a particular odor when the two match up.
• We can learn a new smell and store it in our memory for future use.

• Some claims in popular psychology lead to sound experiments and meaningful discoveries.
• In the early 1980s, most people didn't like the idea of spraying a scent in the air to improve productivity.
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• In New York subway cars, a researcher reported similar results in a large commercial firm.
• Sex-based differences in sensitivity and odor memory can be seen in the olfactory systems of men and women.
• An investigator presented 80 different odors to men and women.
• The par ticipants were told what the smell was after sniffing it several times.
• Women performed better on odor recognition tests than men.
• Among the 63 odors women learned to identify better than men were cigarette butt, leather, pipe tobacco, ginger, honey, and machine oil.
• Men were more familiar with the smells of bubble gum, after-shave, and ammonia than women were.
• The results have been replicated and seem to be well established.
• Women with high levels of estrogen in the inner ear may have better olfactory abilities than men, and women may pay more attention to olfactory that allows us to make adjustments than men.
• It will be interesting to see what answers further research brings and to determine if there are cultural differences as well.

• An experiment that proved the interdependence of smell and taste in expe riencing a flavor was reported by one set of researchers.
• They put a flavor on a participant's tongue and asked them to identify it.
• When participants were able to smell, they were correct on most occasions, but when the experimenter prevented them from smelling, they were often unable to identify it.
• When partici pants were able to taste and smell coffee, its flavor was correctly identified nearly 90 percent of the time.
• When they were allowed to only taste it, its flavor was less than 5% of the time.

• You can demonstrate it yourself.
• Close your eyes, hold your nose, and have a friend put something in your mouth.

• We often confuse different flavors when we must rely on taste alone.

• The smell of food is a good indicator of what we are eating and how it tastes.

• Our perception of taste is influenced by odors and odor memories.
• The sensation of taste is amplified when an odor component is added.

• Vision, hearing, taste, and smell are important senses, but they are not the only ones.
• If you have ridden a roller coaster at an amusement park, worn a piece of clothing that was too small, or put your hand into a pan of water, you are aware of your other senses.
• The somatosensory (bodily) processes are discussed in this section.

• The canal is filled with a fluid that moves when the head moves.
• Hair cells located in the canal bend when the fluid in the canal moves.
• The hair cells send information to the brain.

• If you want to experience the system, you have to move your head.
• You should not have a problem.
• Move the book while you are reading.
• The act of reading should be more difficult.
• Our head movement has an effect on the vestibular system.
• We can make adjustments to keep our world in this gymnast's performance if we sense movement in our eyes, head, and body.

• We can orient ourselves to our environment with this perspective.

• You are aware of your proprioceptive sense if you fail to duck sufficiently when going through a low doorway.

• Information about the limb cord is sent to the somatosen motion sory cortex in the brain.
• Even though we don't pay much attention to the skin that provides information about muscular adjustments and receptors that are involved in adapting to our environment, these are crucial for effective, efficient adaptation to our environment.

• Some sections of our skin are packed with many different types of skin cells that respond to different types of cutaneous information.

• The outer layer of the skin has many of the same receptors.

• The hypothalamus is a major regulatory center in the brain and is located in the preoptic area of the spine.

• Extreme heat or cold, toxic chemicals, or breaking of the skin are some of the harmful stimuli that cause the sensation of pain.
• Think about the different types of pain you have experienced.
• A bright, sharp pain can be caused by a pinprick, whereas a dull, chronic pain can be caused by physical overexertion.
• Pain helps us adapt to the environment.

• Our understanding of pain has been influenced by Price.
• A short oral cord should be prepared for the spinal student by the axons of the pain neurons.
• Substance P causes the brain to send information about pain to the spinal cord, which in turn causes the brain to process basic facts.

• The substance P opens the pain gate.

• The release of substance P is blocked and the pain gate is closed.
• Pain, stress, and thrilling situa tions are some of the conditions that cause the release of endorphins.

• Female athletes had higher pain thresholds than female nonathletes.

• Cultural differences in the response to pain have been reported.

• The properties and operation of the five major senses are summarized in the study chart.

• Hairs are located in the air.

• The smell is stimulated by the smell in the air.

• Hearing disorders can be caused by damage to the bones of memories.

• perception is the process of organizing and making sense of the stimuli in our environment, as we discussed at the beginning of this chapter.
• Research on vision has learned a lot about perception because we rely so much on the visual sense.
• To understand perceptual processes, we focus on visual.
• Many of the processes that we discuss also apply to other senses, so try to use these principles to describe the perception of sounds, tastes, and odors as well as pressure, pain, and temperature.

• It is not a simple matter of perception.
• Our discussion of perception begins with a description of how perception is influenced by motivation and attention.

• We don't perceive everything in our environment because of our motives.
• Certain stimuli are more likely to get our attention.

• Think back to the part about only seeing the billboards advertising food.
• The other billboards activated your recep tors, but you didn't see them because they weren't related to hun ger.
• You begin to notice other things now that your need for food has been satisfied.
• You become aware of billboards for gas stations.

• We can't process all of the stimuli received by our sensory systems at the same time.
• The need to filter information is an example.

• In dichotic listening experiments, a different message is presented to each participant's ears, and the participant is asked to recall both messages.
• Special headphones and a tape recorder are usually used in these experiments.
• Three people can accomplish the same goal if they have the right equipment.
• Place three chairs side by side.
• A person on the right and a person on the left are reading the same book.
• Try to repeat or write down whatever you remember after a fixed amount of time.
• A male voice in one ear and a female voice in the other ear can be used to create interesting variations of this basic procedure.

• If you try to listen to both messages at the same time, you will end up getting confused.

• Some intriguing information about human perception has been uncovered by research in this area.

• The scene is a typical weekend party, with lots of the ability to discriminate people doing lots of talking.
• Suddenly you hear your name mentioned in a conversation on the other side of the room while you are having a conversation with five or six friends.

• Your name was not shouted, and you don't know anything else that was said.
• You have been processing other conversations during your conversation with your friends.
• Only when the content included something important, like your name, did the conversation enter your consciousness.

• It is possible to listen to two messages at the same time.
• To practice is the answer.
• The more you learn how to process two separate messages at the same time, the more skilled you will become.
• Most of us can listen to a CD while driving.

• Our attention is divided between the visual stimuli and the CD.
• We don't want you to think that trying to divide your attention is a good goal.
• The number of traffic accidents caused by people talking on cell phones while driving is a good example of a potentially dangerous situation.

• Some aspects of stimuli determine which ones get our attention.

• People tend to pay more attention to larger, louder, or more colorful stimuli.
• You can see how advertisers exploit this phenomenon by watching television commercials.
• You are attracted to stimuli that stand out from the objects around them.

• Advertisers use bright colors quickly when something happens.
• When contrast and surprise combine, our attention is given to unusual shapes.
• For example, if your instructor wore pajamas to class, this unusual occur motion would attract our attention.

• The complete picture is not provided by motivation and attention.
• There are basic perceptual abilities that we use to respond to stimuli.

• Patterns, constancy, depth, and movement are some of the features that we see in objects in our environment.
• Our perception of these objects and their features is so automatic that we often take them for granted.
• They are important components of perception.
• They are described in detail in this section.

• The ability to perceive patterns is one of the most basic perceptual abilities.
• We must be able to see a number of shapes and figures to survive in modern society.
• The letters of the alphabet, traffic signs, friends' facial features, food items in the gro cery store, buildings in an apartment complex, and automobiles in a parking lot are some of the patterns we deal with every day.

• There are several theories about the process of pattern perception.

• We start from the bottom and work our way up to the point where we can see the building.
• When an object is assembled, it is matched against an object in memory.
• We can identify the item if there is a match.
• We probably look for the memory that resembles the most closely if there is no match.

• If we look at the task of recognizing words, the bottom-up changes in the model of feature analysis run into problems.

• If your environment had changed completely, you don't have to treat every perceptual change as such.
• Once you have identified an object, you can still see it even if it's not where you are.
• A change in the image doesn't mean a change in the object.
• Perceptual constancies allow us to deal with our environment in a stable and unchanging way.

• The shape of an object is not seen by the eye in the same way.
• It's easy to demonstrate this phenomenon.
• There is a book being held in different places.
• The opening and closing of a door and the image of a car making a left turn are both examples.
• The object you perceive is not the same as the image on your retina.
• The principle of shape constancy is displayed by almost any moving object.
• The object must be seen in an identifiable context for the perception of shape constancy to occur.

• If there is no context or background to which the object can be related, it appears to float in space, and you cannot judge its correct orientation.

• As objects move closer to us, their images enlarge; as they move further away, their images diminish.
• We don't see the size of those objects changing, but we see them moving away from us.
• Our familiarity with the object and our ability to judge distance determine the size of the object.
• We are more likely to see the size of the objects as constant when we are dealing with familiar objects.

• The objects may appear to be smaller when we are dealing with unfamiliar objects.

• Consider a classic example to understand this point.
• C. M. Turnbull was studying the BaMbuti Pygmies in the dense forest of the Belgian distance or the size of other objects.
• He traveled from one group of Pygmies to another.

• See the On one trip, which took him across the plains, he was accompanied by a youngster, end of the chapter for another photo that gives you a better idea as to the Kenge, who had spent his entire life in the dense forest.
• I have never been on the size of this object.

• Kenge tried to compare the distant buffalo to the various beetles and ants that he was familiar with.
• Imagine Kenge's surprise when he saw the buffalo grow larger as they drove by.
• Our culture and experiences have an effect on our perception of real life and pictures.

• Because they are automatic processes, size and shape constancy may seem simple, but they involve a lot of processing.
• We are using familiar background objects to anchor our per ceptions.
• We have difficulty seeing the correct size and distance if the background objects are eliminated.
• In the story of Kenge, we can't judge size well without objects with which to make comparisons.
• Without a back ground to anchor our perception, moving objects may appear to change shape rather than just move in space.

• Auditory constancies are an important part of perception.
• Words are the same when they are spoken by many different people.

• A melody is recognizable even when it is played on different instruments.

• The question of how we can perceive depth or distance has puzzled psychologists for decades.
• We are able to judge distances and locate objects in space, even though the surface of the retina is two-dimensional.
• Our perception of depth is created by two main types of cues.

• A weak, nonprecise cue and binocular disparity are two binocular cues.
• Eye muscle adjustments are the first thing we should consider.

• The muscles that support our eyes allow us to see better.
• They give feedback for judging distance.
• The eyes rotation toward a center point when objects are near.
• When you look at objects that are close, you can feel the tension in your muscles.
• Slowly move the book closer to your eyes to experience this sensation.
• The closer the book is to you, the less eye muscle strain you experience.

• The difference between eye muscle adjustments and binocular disparity is more precise.

• It's obvious that you don't see the same thing with both eyes if you open and close one.
• The closer the object is, the bigger the difference between what the two eyes see.
• A sense of depth is created when the images from both eyes are combined.

• Researchers have identified cortical cells that respond to binocular disparity, assuming that the activity of these cells is a primary cue for depth.
• Close one eye and align your two index fingers to show binocular disparity.
• Now look at something with different eyes.

• This is worse when the fingers are closer to the face than they are at arm's length.

• The use of both eyes is used to help determine distance when the ciliary muscles are used to change the shape of the lens.

• Interposition and brightness are two of the monocular cues for depth perception.

• You should look around the room you are in and see other examples of these cues after you have studied the three photographs.

• In order to demonstrate the importance of binocular and mon ocular cues for depth perception, psychologists have investigated whether this ability is innate or learned.
• The bottom of one side of the chamber is easy to reach and the bottom of the other side is deeper.
• The cham ber is covered in glass.
• A test participant is placed on a small platform in the center of the visual cliff and must choose between crawling to the shal low or deep side.
• The child will be mobile.

• Babies as young as 2 to 4 months old had a higher heart rate when placed on the deep side of the cliff.
• The highest honor that can be bestowed on a scientist by the president of the United States is the National Medal of Science, which was awarded by George Bush in 1992.

• We are born with the ability to organize the elements of our perceptual world in very predictable ways according to the founders of Gestalt psychology.
• The goal of the automatic organizing processes is to produce the best perception of our environment.
• The grouping of elements and figure-ground distinctions are some of the most familiar of these processes.

• One of the ways in which we organize our percep tual world is by sorting stimuli into figure and background.
• The focus of our attention is the figure, while the rest of our perception is the ground.
• The figure is smaller, more colorful, or brighter than the background.

• Automatic processes can trick us.
• Determine what is figure and what is ground in each example by looking at Figure 3-18.
• The figure-ground relation is unclear or ambiguous in each instance, and the task is more difficult than in Figure 3-17.
• The source of that may depend on top-down influences created by reading the caption.

• You push the brake harder when your foot is on it.
• The back ward motion continues.
• You don't realize that the truck is moving until you see it.

• You thought of your car as the figure and the truck as the ground.
• You perceived yourself as the moving object, rather than the truck, because figures normally move across a background.

• The psychologists showed that we organize our perception by grouping elements.
• The way in which we group perceptual elements is very important.

• If you had to deal with every percep tual element on your own, how much trouble would you have?
• We call words when the letters you are reading fall into groups.

• When we organize perceptual elements into groups, they are seen as a group.

• There are several conditions that promote grouping of perceptual elements.
• Although we don't agree with the principle of cussing these conditions separately, keep in mind that more than one of them can operate perceptual elements that are similar at a time.
• Take a look at how many conditions you notice in your day-to-day life.

• Think about words or music.

• It should be easier to see a continuous flowing figure than it is to see two separate lines.

• The missing pieces had to be created perceptually to complete the picture.
• This process shows the relationship between the two things.
• The seven lines are three pairs and an extra line at the right because of the relative proximity of the pairs of lines.

• We tend to see a complete bicycle rather than two separate parts if we overlook incompleteness in sensory information.

• If you notice a message on an elec independently tronic sign while you're on your way to your next class, the Gestalt principle says it's easier to perception movement into whole objects.

• This sign adds to our consideration of perception.

• The words appear to move across the sign.
• The lights are turned on and off in a sequence in the electronic sign.
• Think about movies, television, and DVD's.
• The brain's ability to create perception of motion from a series of still pictures is what all of these forms of entertainment rely on.

• Your brain creates the illusion of movement even when there is no movement.
• Your vision would stop if your receptors changed.
• You will need a small flashlight, some string, and a dark room to demonstrate the autokinetic effect.
• The flashlight can be hung from a light fixture or ceiling fan.
• All the lights in the room should be turned off.
• The light should move within a minute or less.
• The effect is due to small eye movements that the brain doesn't track.

• Although pictures are worth a thousand words, they don't always give us an ac curate picture.
• Humans are primarily visual creatures and yet we are subject to quite a number of visual illusions.

• perception involves the brain's attempt to make sense of the stimuli we receive from our environment We can develop educated guesses about the nature of those stimuli with the help ofancy, figure-ground rela tions, and grouping processes.
• The events in your perceptual world can be constant and stable.
• Change and diversity are what your perceptual hypothesis will be on other occasions.
• The ability to discriminate between hypoth eses is important for adaptation to the environment.
• Don't assume that it's always easy to discriminate the same and different when you say "Yes, that's only good common sense that everyone already knows."
• When we anticipate that change is likely or logical, we can discriminate, but we don't notice improbable or unlikely changes very well.

• Sometimes our perceptual hypotheses are wrong.

• Most of us fail to appreciate what we have and long for what we don't.
• Give this question a thought.
• Before reading further, you should write down your answer and reasons for it.

• There is an explanation for the answer to the green-grass question.
• You can see both green grass and dark brown soil when you look down at the grass in your yard.
• The colors blend together.
• You don't see the brown soil when you look at the grass across the fence because you are not looking straight down.
• The grass on the other side of the fence is a shade of green.
• Your senses are tricked into believing that the grass on the other side of the fence is better.

• It's easy to trick our senses into thinking that stimuli don't correspond to esis.

• Many illusions are caused by perceptual hypotheses.

• On the other side of the fence, the grass looks green.

• Incorrect perceptual hypotheses are at the heart of perceptual illusions.

• In this illusion, big circles make a central circle appear small, whereas small circles make a central circle look larger.

• The Ames room is one of the most fascinating perceptual illusions.

• People don't have basic perceptual abilities.

• You thought the floors were level.

• The 1990s were the decade of the brain.
• Recent advances in the study of brain functioning promise to change our perception of sensory processes.
• According to studies of the human visual cortex, sensory processing does not occur in a strictly sequential manner where one part of the brain performs an activity and then passes the modified sensation on to another brain area for additional processing.

• The study of perceptual processes has direct real-world applications.
• The distractors seem to lose interest in the high-salience stimuli.
• The pop-out effect can be created by features such as color, motion, brightness, and prior experience with the target.
• A more lengthy and difficult visual search can result from the combination of these features.
• There are several notable applications of visual search research to real-life situations in which target stimuli must be detected from distractors.

• The spe cific nature of the problem faced by dyslexic people was revealed by Ballew, Brooks, and Annacelli, who studied the effect of contrast on reading ability.
• Maintaining high letter-background contrast can be used to aid the dyslexic individual.

• Lauren Scharff and her colleagues have shown that the type of back ground texture can affect text readability for normal individuals.
• The area of applied perception research is paying rich dividends.

• If you own a flat-screen computer monitor, television, color printer, or digital camera, contemporary perception research has impacted your life.
• The development of high-tech displays for these applications and "for harsh visual environments such as the airplane cockpit" is a prime area of perception research.
• The perception researcher has to make sure the colors on the devices are accurate.
• The development of seat belt alarms has been influenced by perception research.
• When the seat belt wasn't fastened, the alarms made a loud noise.
• The drivers were able to cover up the noise with other loud noises.
• Researchers found that a softer but higher-pitched dinging sound was more effective.

• The use of cell phones while driving is a recent phenomenon that has the potential to be impacted by basic perception research.
• A reduction of drivers' attention is caused by engaging in cognitive tasks.
• The reduced attention to billboards and signs resulted in impaired reactions to other vehicles that braked.

• Basic perception research has provided important information and promises to yield additional real-life applications in the future.
• It can tell us about social processes.

• He used the power of his mind to cause a large rocking chair to move back and forth.

• It is possible to communicate between minds without using the normal senses and 26% believe it is possible to know the past and predict the future through the power of the mind, according to a survey.
• College students have a common belief in such phenomena.
• The existence of ESP was well documented in one study.

• clairvoyance, telepathy, and precognition are some examples of ESP.
• You might be showing clairvoyance if you could tell us what was in the closed box that you had never seen.
• Some researchers don't consider psychokinesis an example of ESP because it doesn't involve perception.

• People claimed that they could receive messages from the dead.

• Many of Rhine's experiments used a deck of Zener cards with five different designs: circle, cross, rectangle, and star.
• In a typical study, the participant's task was to guess the design on each card as an experimenter selected it from the deck.
• Rhine compared each person's success with the success rate expected on the basis of chance, which is 20%.
• A number of participants did better than expected.

• Some of the best performers may have been able to cheat.

• The success rates may have been due to the fact that participants could use the cards as clues.
• It was possible to read the symbol through the back of a worn card with the right light.

• The claims offered by ESP supporters are presented in ways that make it difficult to design a definitive test.
• According to James Alcock (1989), parapsychology has failed to show scientific evidence of its validity.
• Parapsychology has been termed a controversial science.

• A series of nine experiments involving more than 1,000 participants was reported on by a Cornell University researcher in 2011.
• In one experiment, participants sat in front of a computer screen with curtains.
• The computer would project a neutral, negative, or erotic image.
• When the images were neutral, participants guessed less than half of the Zener cards used in parapsychological research.

• When the images were erotic, they correctly guessed which screen the computer would select.
• According to Bem, there was an active influ ence in the erotic images.
• Critics are skeptical that the effect is small.

• Most scientists agree that unexplained phenomena can be explained with non normal evidence.
• We need to write well-established scientific principles to account for supernatural explanations.
• The law of parsimony suggests that we look for explanations that require less assumptions if they can explain the phenomenon in question.

• One researcher observes that there are many guises for the evidence for supernatural claims.

• The majority of the evidence comes from personal experience, anecdotes, and folklore.
• Although psychologists and other scientists realize that the evidence is unreliable, almost every believer has become convinced because of it.

• Many people have psychic experiences that they interpret as such.
• According to psychologists, the way we perceive and remember information is what leads to psychic experiences.
• Explanations that rely on will to believe do not improve our understanding.

• We can be fooled by our experiences in the same way that we can be fooled by visual illusions.
• When we consider coincidences, such as dreams that come true, as evidence of a connection, one illusion that encourages belief in ESP occurs.
• He called me today after we hadn't heard from each other in 15 years.

• The media can affect belief in the supernatural.
• Whether they are ghosts, reincarnation, or spoon bending, supernatural phenomena sell.
• Newspaper stories of alleged phe nomena are often reported as facts, with extensive coverage of the proponents' views and less attention to the skeptics' views.

• Many people have experience with some of the supernatural phenomena.
• Scientists and believers don't agree on what proof is for such phenomena.
• The believers point to laboratory research.
• psy chologists offer explanations for many of the personal experiences that skeptics point to as flaws in the laboratory research.
• The burden of proof for such extraordinary claims rests with the people making them, because psychologists can point to reasons that such phenomena may not occur.

• Although the methods of studying the supernatural have improved, a conclusive demonstration of their existence has not occurred.
• At the beginning of the 20th century, the magi cian Harry Houdini challenged mediums to produce phenomena he could not duplicate.
• The magician James Randi is offering a $1 million reward to anyone who can demonstrate supernatural power under certain conditions.
• No one has been killed.
• Some phenomena that were thought to be impossible or even fraudulent in the past have since been verified to be real.

• Most people believed that the idea of rocks falling from the sky was ridiculous.
• jeers were met with when anyone suggested the possibility of a flying object.
• Despite these reactions, meteorites do fall from the sky.
• There is a certain amount of humility in what we believe and we can be open minded without neglecting the need for empirical evidence.

• Much of our perceptual activity is characterized by parallel processing.

• The social context may affect perception.

• On the presence of a background and our ability to judge our normal sensory abilities, such occurrences are considered to be supernatural.

• According to what law, we should search for explanations and try to sneak some food before the strange things happen.

• When looking for attention, it's important to look at some stimuli and not others.

• The object you saw on p. 112 may be larger than you thought.