stimuli

Examples of stimuli in the following topics:

• Selection

  • Most of us are presented with millions of sensory stimuli a day.
  • Long-term motivations also influence what stimuli we attend to.
  • Emotional drives can also influence the selective attention humans pay to stimuli.
  • This shows that infants selectively attend to specific stimuli in their environment.
  • Humans who could attend closely to these stimuli were more likely to survive than their counterparts, since some intense stimuli (like pain, powerful smells, or loud noises) can indicate danger.

• Unconscious Perception

  • We encounter more stimuli than we can attend to; unconscious perception helps the brain process all stimuli, not just those we take in consciously.
  • Individuals take in more stimuli from their environment than they can consciously attend to at any given moment.
  • The brain is constantly processing all the stimuli it is exposed to, not just those that it consciously attends to.
  • Priming occurs when an unconscious response to an initial stimulus affects responses to future stimuli.
  • A number of studies have examined how unconscious stimuli influence human perception.

• Introducing the Perception Process

  • Perception is the set of unconscious processes we undergo to make sense of the stimuli and sensations we encounter.
  • Our brains engage in a three-step process when presented with stimuli: selection, organization, and interpretation.
  • The perceptual process is a sequence of steps that begins with stimuli in the environment and ends with our interpretation of those stimuli.
  • By putting different stimuli into categories, we can better understand and react to the world around us.
  • Rubin's Vase is a popular optical illusion used to illustrate differences in perception of stimuli.

• Interpretation

  • In the interpretation stage of perception, we attach meaning to stimuli.
  • Each stimulus or group of stimuli can be interpreted in many different ways.
  • Prior experience plays a major role in the way a person interprets stimuli.
  • Different individuals react differently to the same stimuli, depending on their prior experience of that stimuli.
  • Cultural scripts dictate how positive and negative stimuli should be interpreted.

• Attention

  • Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete stimulus while ignoring other perceivable stimuli.
  • Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete stimulus while ignoring other perceivable stimuli.
  • Attention can be thought of as the allocation of limited processing resources: your brain can only devote attention to a limited number of stimuli.
  • Studies show that if there are many stimuli present (especially if they are task-related), it is much easier to ignore the non-task-related stimuli, but if there are few stimuli the mind will perceive the irrelevant stimuli as well as the relevant.
  • Some people can process multiple stimuli with practice.

• Organization

  • Organization is the stage in the perception process in which we mentally arrange stimuli into meaningful and comprehensible patterns.
  • After the brain has decided which of the millions of stimuli it will attend to, it needs to organize the information that it has taken in.
  • Below is a discussion of some of the different ways we organize stimuli.
  • This allows for the grouping together of elements into larger sets, and reduces the need to process a larger number of smaller stimuli.
  • Compare various ways attended stimuli can be organized in the mind

• Basic Principles of Classical Conditioning

  • When a dog sees food, the visual and olfactory stimuli send information to the brain through their respective neural pathways, ultimately activating the salivation glands to secrete saliva.
  • When a dog hears a buzzer and at the same time sees food, the auditory stimuli activates the associated neural pathways.
  • However, since these pathways are being activated at the same time as the other neural pathways, there are weak synapse reactions that occur between the auditory stimuli and the behavioral response.

• Habituation, Sensitization, and Potentiation

  • Potentiation, habituation, and sensitization are three ways in which stimuli in the environment produce changes in the nervous system.
  • Learning occurs when stimuli in the environment produce changes in the nervous system.
  • Habituation involves responding to stimuli and stress less over time—after our body's initial natural resistance to the stimuli.

• Defining Learning

  • Learning is an adaptive function by which our nervous system changes in relation to stimuli in the environment, thus changing our behavioral responses and permitting us to function in our environment.
  • The process occurs initially in our nervous system in response to environmental stimuli.
  • Classical conditioning is a process by which we learn to associate events, or stimuli, that frequently happen together; as a result of this, we learn to anticipate events.

• Sensory Adaptation

  • This is because the additional stimuli are new, and the body has not yet adapted to them.
  • There are many stimuli in life that we experience everyday and gradually ignore or forget, including sounds, images, and smells.