| sensation | The process of receiving stimulus energies from the external environment and transforming those energies into neural energy.
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| perception | The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information so that it has meaning.
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| bottom-up processing | The operation in sensation and perception in which sensory receptors register information about the external environment and send it up to the brain for interpretation.
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| top-down processing | The operation in sensation and perception, launched by cognitive processing at the brain's higher levels, that allows the organism to sense what is happening and to apply that framework to information from the world.
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| sensory receptors | Specialized cells that detect stimulus information and transmit it to sensory (afferent) nerves and the brain.
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| absolute threshold | The minimum amount of stimulus energy that a person can detect.
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| noise | Irrelevant and competing stimuli—not only sounds but also any distracting stimuli for our senses.
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| difference threshold | The degree of difference that must exist between two stimuli before the difference is detected.
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| Weber's law | The principle that two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage (rather than a constant amount) to be perceived as different.
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| subliminal perception | The detection of information below the level of conscious awareness.
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| signal detection theory | A theory of perception that focuses on decision making about stimuli in the presence of uncertainty.
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| attention | The process of focusing awareness on a narrowed aspect of the environment.
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| selective attention | The process of focusing on a specific aspect of experience while ignoring others.
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| perceptual set | A predisposition or readiness to perceive something in a particular way.
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| sensory adaptation | A change in the responsiveness of the sensory system based on the average level of surrounding stimulation.
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| retina | The multilayered light-sensitive surface in the eye that records electromagnetic energy and converts it to neural impulses for processing in the brain.
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| rods | The receptor cells in the retina that are sensitive to light but not very useful for color vision.
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| cones | The receptor cells in the retina that allow for color perception.
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| optic nerve | The structure at the back of the eye, made up of axons of the ganglion cells, that carries visual information to the brain for further processing.
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| feature detectors | Neurons in the brain's visual system that respond to particular features of a stimulus.
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| parallel processing | The simultaneous distribution of information across different neural pathways.
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| binding | In the sense of vision, the bringing together and integration of what is processed by different neural pathways or cells.
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| trichromatic theory | Theory stating that color perception is produced by three types of cone receptors in the retina that are particularly sensitive to different, but overlapping, ranges of wavelengths.
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| opponent-process theory | Theory stating that cells in the visual system respond to complementary pairs of red-green and blue-yellow colors; a given cell might be excited by red and inhibited by green, whereas another cell might be excited by yellow and inhibited by blue.
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| figure-ground relationship | The principle by which we organize the perceptual field into stimuli that stand out (figure) and those that are left over (ground).
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| gestalt psychology | A school of thought interested in how people naturally organize their perceptions according to certain patterns.
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| depth perception | The ability to perceive objects three-dimensionally.
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| binocular cues | Depth cues that depend on the combination of the images in the left and right eyes and on the way the two eyes work together.
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| convergence | A binocular cue to depth and distance in which the muscle movements in our two eyes provide information about how deep and/or far away something is.
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| monocular cues | Powerful depth cues available from the image in one eye, either the right or the left.
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| apparent movement | The perception that a stationary object is moving.
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| perceptual constancy | The recognition that objects are constant and unchanging even though sensory input about them is changing.
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| outer ear | The outermost part of the ear, consisting of the pinna and the external auditory canal.
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| middle ear | The part of the ear that channels sound through the eardrum, hammer, anvil, and stirrup to the inner ear.
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| inner ear | The part of the ear that includes the oval window, cochlea, and basilar membrane and whose function is to convert sound waves into neural impulses and send them to the brain.
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| place theory | Theory on how the inner ear registers the frequency of sound, stating that each frequency produces vibrations at a particular spot on the basilar membrane.
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| frequency theory | Theory on how the inner ear registers the frequency of sound, stating that the perception of a sound's frequency depends on how often the auditory nerve fires.
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| auditory nerve | The nerve structure that receives information about sound from the hair cells of the inner ear and carries these neural impulses to the brain's auditory areas.
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| volley principle | Modification of frequency theory stating that a cluster of nerve cells can fire neural impulses in rapid succession, producing a volley of impulses.
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| thermoreceptors | Sensory nerve endings under the skin that respond to changes in temperature at or near the skin and provide input to keep the body's temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
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| pain | The sensation that warns us of damage to our bodies.
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| papillae | Rounded bumps above the tongue's surface that contain the taste buds, the receptors for taste.
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| olfactory epithelium | The lining the roof of the nasal cavity, containing a sheet of receptor cells for smell.
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| kinesthetic senses | Senses that provide information about movement, posture, and orientation.
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| vestibular sense | Sense that provides information about balance and movement.
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| semicircular canals | Three fluid-filled circular tubes in the inner ear containing the sensory receptors that detect head motion caused when we tilt or move our heads and/or bodies.
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