Psychology 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Thalamus, Reticular Formation, Ganglion Cell

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Mark Holden

Document Summary

Sensation (biological) stimulation of the sensory receptors: e. g. light -> eye sound waves -> ear. Perception (experience) organizing sensory input and giving it meaning : e. g. recognizing a friend"s face or a melody, qualitative experience of the sensation. Psychophysics studies how physical stimuli are translated into psychological experiences: absolute threshold, difference threshold, magnitude estimation a. i. e. correspondence between physical and perceptual magnitude. 1. absolute threshold idea: we can"t detect everything, so what"s the weakest/lowest level we can detect? examples under ideal conditions: difference threshold & jnd. The smallest difference between two stimuli that people can detect (50% of the time) 300g vs 301g: what is the minimum difference between 2 tones before you can tell they are different good musicians have a more sensitive jnd for pitch. Weber"s law: size of the jnd is proportional to the magnitude of the first stimulus, every stimulus type has a different fraction/proportion. E. g. weber"s fraction for lifting weights is 1/30.