Great Gatsby

1. Sensation: the process by which sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment 2. Perception: the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events 3. Bottom-up Processing: analysis that begins with the sense receptors and works up to the brain’s integration of sensory information 4. Top- Down Processing: information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawing on out experience and expectations I. Sensing the World: Some Basic Principles A. Thresholds 1. Psychophysics: the study of relationships between the physical characteristics of stimuli, such as their intensity, and out psychological experience on them; what stimuli can we detect? 2. Absolute Thresholds: the minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the time ( light, sound, pressure, taste, odor); expose eats to varying sound level- each pitch, test defines where half the time you correctly detected the sound and half the time you do not 3. Signal Detection: * Signal Detection Theory: a theory predicting how and when we detect the presence of a faint stimulus amid background stimulation. Assumes that there is no single absolute threshold and that detection depends partly on a person’s experience, expectations, motivation, and level of fatigue; ration of false alarms to hits; absolute thresholds vary- exhausted parents hear small noise, but miss large; war causes responsiveness to increase, may cause false alarms * People respond differently to same stimulus, same person’s reactions vary as circumstances changes- vigilance diminished after 30 minutes of judging when a fait signal appears- depends on task, time of day, and exercise 4. Subliminal Stimulation: * Subliminal: below one’s absolute threshold for conscious awareness * We can sense stimuli below