Study Guide- Chapters 5 and 6 – due on test day!
1. What is the difference between sensation and perception?
2. What is psychophysics?
3. How is absolute threshold determined?
4. Think of some situations that might heighten your signal detection?
5. Can we detect stimuli below the absolute threshold?
6. How does priming work?
7. Does subliminal advertising work? Give one example of a subliminal message
8. Explain Weber’s Law:
9. Explain how some parents are able to “tune out” a crying baby after a few minutes of constant crying:
10. What is sensory transduction?
11. Which part of the eye does transduction?
12. What is sensory adaptation?
13. How do feature detectors assist in parallel processing?
14. If you were to encounter a wavelength of light that was long with high amplitude what would it look
like?
15. Describe the difference between nearsightedness and farsightedness.
16. Briefly explain the sequence of how light travels through the eye:
17. How do rods, cones, bipolar cells, and ganglion cells work together?
18. How do rods and cones differ? Where are they located in the eye?
19. What is the function of the following eye parts
a. Lens
b. Pupil
c. Iris
d. Rods
e. Cones
f. Cornea
g. Retina
h. Optic Nerve
20. Why can cats see much better at night than humans?
21. Describe the process of accommodation.
22. What produces a blindspot in vision?
23. Explain the opponent-process theory:
24. What is the Young-Helmholtz Trichromatic theory?
25. List the opponent colors.
26. Describe color constancy:
27. Describe the phi phenomenon.
28. Explain how the auditory canal, eardrum, hammer, anvil, stirrup, cochlea, basilar membrane, and hair
cells work together to translate sound:
29. List the specific function of the outer ear, middle ear and inner ear
30. What is the difference between loudness and pitch?
31. Explain the volley theory:
32. How does place theory and frequency theory explain how we hear:
33. Where are the tiny bones that amplify sound located in the ear?
34. How can we tell what direction a sound is coming from?
35. What is the difference between sensorineural and conductive hearing loss?
36. Explain the debate over cochlear implants:
37. What are the four distinct skin senses?
38. Explain the gate-control theory of pain:
39. Why might some people not experience pain as severely as others?
40. How do odors evoke memories?
41. How are smell and taste connected?
42. Why is kinesthesis so important?
43. What is the vestibular sense? How are the semicircular canals connected to the vestibular sense?
44. How do the semicircular canals and vestibular sacs work?
45. What is the difference between serial and parallel processing? Which system does our brain use for
sensation and perception?
Chapter 6
1. ______________ = bottom-up processing
______________ = top-down processing
2. What is visual capture?
3. What is the basic premise of Gestaltism?
4. Describe the Cocktail Party Effect and how it relates to selective attention.
5. How do the Gestalt principles of proximity, similarity, continuity, and connectedness help us to make
sense of our world?
6. Why do infants not crawl off the “cliff”?
7. How does retinal disparity work?
8. How does convergence work?
9. What is the difference between monocular and binocular cues?
10. What are the 8 different monocular cues?
11. What is perceptual constancy?
12. Explain the terms brightness constancy, lightness constancy:
13. Describe the figure –ground relationship. Give an example
14. When human infants were given corrective surgery on their eyes, and cochlea implants for their ear,
describe the consequences:
15. Explain what a perceptual set is and provide three everyday examples:
16. How do children’s drawings give us a way to glimpse their developing perceptual schema?
17. Explain contextual effects and provide three examples:
18. What is the role of a human factors psychologist?
19. How can human factor psychologists help to make our world a better place?
20. Which psychological principle do the goggles represent? Explain
21. Describe the Muller-Lyer illusion.
22. What do parapsychologists study?
23. Describe telepathy.
24. Describe clairvoyance.
25. Describe precognition.
Extra Credit from Chapter 2 - Neurotransmitters
The essay will be a define and apply style essay focusing on vocab from
chapter 5 and 6