AP Psychology
Cerqueira Guide Unit 4
Sensation & Perception
IV. Sensation and Perception (6–8%)
Everything that organisms know about the world is first encountered when stimuli in the environment activate sensory
organs, initiating awareness of the external world. Perception involves the interpretation of the sensory inputs as a
cognitive process. AP students in psychology should be able to do the following:
• Discuss basic principles of sensory transduction, including absolute threshold, difference threshold, signal detection,
and sensory adaptation.
• Describe sensory processes (e.g., hearing, vision, touch, taste, smell, vestibular, kinesthesis, pain), including the specific
nature of energy transduction, relevant anatomical structures, and specialized pathways in the brain for each of the
senses.
• Explain common sensory disorders (e.g., visual and hearing impairments).
• Describe general principles of organizing and integrating sensation to promote stable awareness of the external world
(e.g., Gestalt principles, depth perception).
• Discuss how experience and culture can influence perceptual processes (e.g., perceptual set, context effects).
• Explain the role of top-down processing in producing vulnerability to illusion.
• Discuss the role of attention in behavior.
• Challenge common beliefs in parapsychological phenomena.
• Identify the major historical figures in sensation and perception (e.g., Gustav Fechner, David Hubel, Ernst Weber,
Torsten Wiesel).
Date
Class
info
M 2/17
HW
tonight
Topics to know
197203
Sensation v. perception. Bottom-up v. top-down processing. Prosopagnosia. Thresholds:
psychophysics, absolute thresholds, signal-detection theory (hits/false alarms). Subliminal
messages (do they work?). Difference thresholds (jnd), Weber’s law. Sensory adaptation
(what’s good/what’s bad about it).
Vision: transduction, wavelength (fig 5.4), hue, intensity. Parts of the eye: pupil, iris, lens,
retina, rods/cones (table 5.1), optic nerve, blind spot, fovea. How vision happens. Normal
vision, near-/farsightedness. Adaptation. Parallel processing. Fig. 5.14, 5.15, 5.18. Color
theories: Young-Helmholtz, opponent-process theory. Colorblindness. Color is relative to the
surrounding objects. Hearing: frequency and pitch. Parts of the ear: outer ear, ear drum,
middle ear (hammer, anvil, stirrup), inner ear (cochlea, hair cells). How hearing happens.
How loudness is detected. Place and frequency theory (this is hard). Sound location – turn
your head! Kinds of hearing loss.
Touch: pressure, warmth, cold, pain. The problem of pain, phantom limb pain, gate
control-theory, pain control, firewalking (!). Taste: four sensations + umami. (Ask Jones:
why is the tongue map wrong?) How taste happens: receptors. Sensory interaction,
synesthesia. Smell, how smelling happens (ask Mr. J about the AP question!). Smell &
memory. Kinesthesis, vestibular sense.
Perception v. sensation. Selective attention, the cocktail-party effect, cell phones and
driving, inattentional/change blindness. Illusions, visual capture. Gestalt: the ____ is
greater than the ______. Form perception: figure-ground, proximity, similarity, continuity,
connectedness, and closure (Fig. 6.6 and 6.7). Depth perception & the visual cliff
experiment. Binocular cues, retinal disparity and convergence. Monocular cues (in art!).
Motion perception, stroboscopic movement, phi phenomenon. Constancy. Muller-Lyon
illusion. Culture and perception. Fig. 6.16 (the Ames room).
Sensory deprivation restored vision (be sure to know critical period). Perceptual
adaptation (goggles). Perceptual set (define in your own words), schemas, face recognition.
The importance of context. HUMAN FACTORS (skim 261-263.) ESP – what is the evidence
for and against its existence?
S&P review day
T 2/18
R quiz
197203
204224
W 2/19
C quiz
on
vision.
224235
Th
2/20
237254
F 2/21
R quiz
237254
254269
M 2/24
C quiz
perc.
---
T 2/25
Test on Unit 4; see next Cerqueira guide for tonight’s reading