Sensation and Perception - AP Psychology

Selective attention allows one to focus on certain specific sensory information, while ignoring other sensory input. All of the given examples would require selective attention, and in fact, almost every situation you could imagine would require some level of selective attention. For example, when reading a book, even if you are in a quiet room, you require selective attention to focus on the pages and words while ignoring any sort of background noise or action in your periphery.

Absolute threshold is the lowest level of stimulation that an organism can detect. For example, the quietest sound that a human can hear is their absolute threshold for hearing.

Top-down processing involves the impact of prior knowledge on sensation and perception. Many optical illusions are successful by capitalizing on our prior knowledge to influence our perception of an image.

The cocktail party effect describes a person's ability to attend to just one voice among a group of voices--akin to a party guest's ability to listen to just one person's voice among the voices of many conversations.

Jeff's knowledge that the amount of juice stayed constant is evidence that he understands conservation. According to Piaget, a child's understanding of the conservation concept is characteristic of the concrete operational stage, as this stage marks the start of logical and operational thinking.

Inattentional blindness describes the ability of the human mind to block out all but a single, deeply focused on piece of sensory input. The sudden sensory input of the dog in front of his car caused Sam's focus to narrow so significantly that he was inattentonally blind to the car next to him. The cocktail party effect, on the other hand, describes a person's ability to single out one voice among many in a room, and even to shift that focus, picking individual sounds on which to focus in a noisy room.

Top-down processing involves processing information by utilizing prior knowledge and conceptual knowledge of the whole. This allows the perception of how the smaller pieces make the whole. Timmy sees the whole, assembled structure of the engine in order to understand the workings of the spark plugs. Had he looked a spark plug, then attempted to figure out the workings of the engine, that would have been bottom-up processing.

Inattentional blindness is failing to see objects when our attention is directed elsewhere. An example of this would be going through a red light while driving because your attention was focused on texting.

Gestalt psychology emphasizes "the whole" because humans tend to integrate pieces of information into meaningful wholes. Gestalt therapy focuses on individual responsibility. Gradient is not a principle of Gestalt psychology, while all of the other answer choices convey how humans process information in wholes.

Inattentional blindness occurs when someone is hyper-focused on one stimulus and unable to take in other information. Rick was so focused on where the ball was and he missed another player making a seemingly blatant foul. The blind spot is the point where the optic nerve exits the eye from the retina to the brain. Optical illusion is an umbrella term that can refer to many different principles of perceptual organization. The Phi Phenomenon is the illusion of movement created by presenting visual stimuli in rapid succession (much like a cartoon flip book).

In this example Robin is making use of chunking, which improves short-term memory by grouping items together. For example, if Robin had to memorize a string of numbers (e.g. 91769512), then she could chunk together into four number strings reminiscent of years (e.g. "1976" and "1925"). A mnemonic device is a string of words or an acronym to help recall information. For example, ROYGBIV helps some people remember the colors of the rainbow. The peg-word system is another memory strategy that involves memorizing a list of words by associating the words with specific numbers that are "pegged" onto an imaginary board, such as "two" and "shoe." The primacy effect refers to the tendency to remember the first item on a list better than later items. Echoic memory is a form of sensory memory that can be retained for 3 to 4 seconds. Last, the primacy effect and echoic memory do not refer to memorization strategies.

The retina captures external light and converts it into visual images that are sent to the brain. The retina contains rods, which detect black and white, and cones, which detect color.

A big part of the way humans learn is by starting with a very general concept, and then organizing more detailed concepts within that general paradigm. This means that concepts we have learned before can influence new ideas and concepts that we are learning. When reading a sign, you use your previous knowledge of possible words and phrases, and put that together with the sensory knowledge you acquire from the sign.

Gestalt's principles do reference the phenomena of the mind making a whole based on small parts, but generally refers to visual construction as opposed to semantic meaning.

Prosopagnosia can be either congenital or acquired. Congenital cases are more rare, and the most difficult to treat. Acquired prosopagnosia usually results from damage to the occipito-temporal lobe. The fusiform gyrus has been shown to activate in response to faces in several different neuro-psychological studies. This disorder is famously chronicled in the novel "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by Oliver Sacks.

Our brains use the differences in the location of an object on our retinas in order to judge their relative distance from one another. This requires two eyes, and thus is binocular. The other cues listed require only one eye (monocular).

Gate-control theory posits that the spinal cord contains a "gate" that controls whether pain signals get sent to the brain or not. This "gate" is opened based on the strength of the pain signals from the body.

Figure-ground is a perception used to distinguish a figure from its background, whether that be black words on a white page or distinguishing a particular voice from a crowd. There are many cues that enable us to distinguish a figure from its background, like color, shapes, edges, movements, or sounds. Figure-ground perception is a part of “Gestalt principles," or the prcoess of evaluating the bigger picture.

Retinal disparity is a binocular cue that involves observing the difference between the two images the retinas receive of a single object. The greater the difference, the closer the object is to the viewer.

Justin can physically speak, so we can rule out Broca's area, which is in the frontal lobe. However, he is unable to understand language, which is handled by Wernicke’s area. Wernicke’s area is located in the temporal lobe.