Sensation and Perception - Crash Course Psychology #5
Name:____________________________________ Date:_____________________ Period:_______
Directions- Use the following link to answer the questions below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unWnZvXJH2o
1. Sacks has a form of prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder that impairs a person’s ability to
perceive or recognize faces, also known as __________________ blindness.
2. There’s a lot to sense in the world and not everybody needs to sense all the same stuff. So
every animal has its limitations which we can talk about more precisely if we define the
Absolute Threshold of Sensation, the minimum stimulation needed to register a particular
stimulus, ____________ percent of the time.
3. It’s also about your psychological state; your alertness and expectations in the moment. This
has to do with Signal ____________________ Theory, a model for predicting how and when a
person will detect a weak stimuli, partly based on context.
4. The point at which one can tell the difference is the _____________________Threshold, but it’s
not linear.
5. So how do we transform light waves into meaningful information? Well let’s start with the light
itself. What we humans see as light is only a small fraction of the full spectrum of
electromagnetic radiation that ranges from gamma to ___________________waves.
6. So after taking this light in through the cornea and the pupil, it hits the transparent disc behind
the pupil; the lens, which focuses the light rays into specific images and just as you’d expect the
lens to do, it projects these images onto the ______________, the inner surface of the eyeball
that contains all the receptor cells that begin sensing that visual information.
7. What are retinal receptors called?
8.
There’s a good deal of ongoing research around exactly how our color vision works. But two
theories help us explain some of what we know. One model, called the Young-Helmholtz
____________________________ Theory suggests that the retina houses three specific color receptor
cones that register red, green and blue and when stimulated together, their combined power allows the
eye to register any color
9.
But back to your eyeballs. When stimulated, the rods and cones trigger chemical changes that
spark neural signals which in turn activate the cells behind them called bipolar cells, whose job it is to
turn on the neighboring ____________________________ cells.
This ability to process and analyze many separate aspects of the situation at once is called
_____________________________Processing. In the case of visual processing, this means that the
brain simultaneously works on making sense of form, depth, motion and color and this is where we
enter the whole world of perception which gets complicated quickly, and can even get downright
philosophical.
Answer Key
1. This freaky thing illustrates the weighted significance of our_____sensory______________
receptors. His disproportional hands are monstrous, for example, because we primarily touch the
world with our hands, not our elbows, so our hands are extremely sensitive.
2. Sound moves in _______waves___________ that vibrate through a medium, like air
3. While the human ear might not be as elegant as the jackrabbit's, or as wild as the long-eared bat's,
it's actually a pretty incredible _____organ__________.
4. Taste is nothing without _____smell___________. Plug your nose in a bite of cold bacon and it's
just a mouthful of salt. This is a prime example of sensory interaction; the principle that one sense
can influence another
5. Most of you said no to all of those questions, but at least one of you out there answered yes. And
more likely than not, that person has synesthesia, a rare and fascinating neurological condition
where two or more ______senses__________ get wrapped together.
6. Just another example of how the _______mind___________ is still extremely mysterious.
7. These receptors send information to the brain's olfactory bulb, then zips it on to the primary smell
cortex and parts of the limbic system responsible for emotion and
_______memory_____________.
8. The emotional power of smell partly has to with how our sense circuitry connects to the brain's
limbic system, right next to our emotional registry, the amygdala, and our
_________memory_____________keeper, the hippocampus. That's why scents can be so
intimately tied with our feelings and _______memories__________________________.
9. Smelling, hearing, tasting, seeing, all fantastic, but if there's one thing that popular music taught
us, besides a bunch of really terrible relationship advice, it's that when it comes to our senses,
we're all about ________touching_______________________.
10. Your sense of touch is actually a combination of four distinct skin sensations: pressure, warmth,
cold and __________pain_____________________.
11. The partner sense to your kinesthesis is your____________vestibular ____________ sense,
which monitors your head's position and your balance.
12. Answers will vary, grade as completion.