i. The Eye
a. Figure out HOW AN OBJECT TRAVELS THROUGH THE EYE
ii. The Blind Spot
iii. Visual Receptors
a. You can see rods in dim light (cones turn off)/can't read in dim light
ii. Optic Xiasium: stuff from left side of both eyeballs goes to the right side of brain and vice versa
iii. Vision: How the Eyes and the Brain Convert Light Waves to Neural Signals
a. Visual acuity: ability to see fine detail
b. Visible light: portion of electromagnetic spectrum seen
i. Three kinds of cones: red, green, blue-responds to most colors
b. Light adaptation v. dark adaptation
ii. Depth Perception: you interpret things that are close to you
a. Monocular cues
i. Overlap
ii. Familiar size
iii. Motion parallax
iv. Linear perspective
b. Physiological cues
i. Accommodation: muscles always changing your lenses; why middle aged people wear
glasses
ii. Convergence
b. Binocular disparity: seeing two of everything when you hold your finger up
ii. The Ear
a. Pinna: flap of skin and cartilage
b. Tympanic membrane ; boundary between the outer ear and middle ear
c. Middle ear: region filled with air; important for tympanic membrane to be at rest-there can't
be too much pressure from the middle ear, so it's important to have an equal balance of air
i. Eustachian tube: connects the ear to the throat to create pressure for the middle ear
b. Inner ear: cochlea: filled with fluid that helps you balance
i. Small part of cochlea called oval window: where the stirrup attaches
ii. Basilar membrane: hair cells-when bent over, fire away
iii. Place Theory: tip of the cochlea-low frequencies, bottom of cochlea-high frequencies ;
low notes, you can both feel and hear
iv. Frequency theory:
b. Overtones: when you make a waves at 100 Hz, you also make waves of 200, 400, 800 Hz;
timbre: pattern of overtones
c. Sound Localization: where does sound come from?
i. Amplitude difference: sound disperses as it goes away from the source
ii. Timing difference between ears: it takes a tiny difference to get from one ear as
opposed to another ear
iii. Reflections by pinna and face
b. Skin Senses: Aristotle's Touch
i. Somatosensation:
1. TOUCH
2. Pressure
3. Changes in pressure
4. Warm
5. Cold
, 6. Pain
7. The kinesthetic sense: sense of balance
8. The vestibular sense
b. Smell (olfaction)
i. Chemical triggers firing of sensory neurons
ii. Travels to the olfactory bulb in the brain, to the amygdala, to the hippocampus, and
the hypothalamus (emotions, memory, feeding, sex) remnant of evolutionary past
1. At the top of the nose, there are ORN (olf. Receptor neurons)
ii. Smell: no simple mapping between the physical and the psychological
iii. Smell is closely related to emotional and social behavior
b. Taste: Gustation
i. Taste is what your tongue detects-sweet, sour, bitter, salty, umami
ii. Bumps on the tongue are papillae. Taste buds are receptors in the papilllae
CHAPTER NOTES
i. Sensation and Perception are Distinct Activities: sense is taking in everything while perception
interprets everything
a. Sensation: simple stimulation of a sense organ
b. Perception: organization, identification, and interpretation of a sensation to form a mental
representation
c. Transduction: takes place when many sensors in the body convert physical signals from the
environment into encoded neural signals sent to the central nervous system
d. Psychophysics: methods that measure the strength of a stimulus and the observer's
sensitivity to that stimulus
e. Sensory Adaptation: sensitivity to prolonged stimulation tends to decline over time as an
organism adapts to current conditions
ii. Vision I: How the Eyes and Brain Convert Light Waves to Neural Signals
a. Visual acuity: ability to see fine detail
b. Sensing Light
i. Three properties of light waves: length of the light wave determines the hue, intensity
of a light wave conveys brightness, and purity tells us the saturation/richness of color
b. Human Eye:
i. Light that reaches the eye first passes through the cornea and then passes on to the
pupil (a hole in the colored part of your eye.
ii. Muscles behind the iris bend light to focus on the retina: light-sensitive tissue lining
the back of the eyeball
1. Accommodation: the process by which the eye maintains a clear image on the
retina
ii. From the Eye to the Brain: two types of photoreceptors that form innermost layer of
retina
1. Cones: photoreceptors that detect color, operate under normal daylight
conditions, and allow humans to focus on fine detain
2. Rods: photoreceptors that become active under low-light conditions for night
vision; sense only shades of gray
3. Fovea: center of eye, where the vision is the clearest and there are no rods at all;
reduces the sharpness of vision in reduced light
4. Bipolar Cells collect neural signals from rods and cones and transmits them to
the retinal ganglion cells, which organizes the signals and send them to the brain
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