Sensation & Perception Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the auditory illusion of a tone that seems to climb (or fall) in pitch endlessly without ever actually getting any higher, made by sounding several octaves at once and steadily fading the top and bottom ones out as the middle ones rise?

Question 2

What is the name for the receptor cells of the inner ear, each topped with a bundle of fine, graded projections that open ion channels when bent by the movement of fluid, generating the signal for hearing and for balance?

Question 3

What is the name for the rare ability, found mainly in a small share of young children, to hold an unusually vivid and detailed visual image of a scene for up to a few minutes after looking away, describing it as if still looking at it?

Question 4

What is the name for the taut membrane at the inner end of the ear canal that is set vibrating by the pressure waves of incoming sound and passes those vibrations on to the chain of tiny bones in the air-filled middle ear?

Question 5

What is the name for the sense of balance and of the position and movement of the head, based in the inner ear alongside the hearing organ, using three fluid-filled loops that detect turning and two chambers with weighted crystals that detect tilt and straight-line acceleration?

Question 6

What is the name for the depth cue, needing only one eye, by which, as the observer moves, nearby things sweep rapidly across the field of view while distant things drift slowly, an effect obvious from the window of a moving train?

Question 7

What is the name for the part of a food's 'flavour' that is neither its taste nor its smell but the tingling, cooling, burning, numbing or fizzing that is picked up by the same facial nerve that carries touch and pain, so that chilli 'heat', mint 'cool' and the prickle of a fizzy drink all belong to it?

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About Sensation & Perception

This quiz is about how the senses register the world and how the brain turns that raw input into experience: the sense organs and how they work, the limits and laws of detection, colour and hearing theory, the balance and skin and chemical senses, the Gestalt rules of organisation, depth cues and constancy, the great visual illusions, and the effects of attention and expectation. One hundred questions in five packs, each describing a structure, a process, a threshold, a theory, an illusion or an effect and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. It is a knowledge quiz.

The first pack is the basics of sensation and the eye: the difference between sensing and perceiving, transduction, the absolute and difference thresholds, Fechner's law and signal detection, sensory adaptation, subliminal stimulation, the cornea, pupil and lens, the retina, rods and cones, the fovea and the blind spot, dark adaptation, the optic nerve, feature detectors and the two visual streams.

The second pack is colour and hearing: the three-receptor and opponent-process theories of colour, the negative afterimage, colour blindness, the Purkinje shift; then the pinna, eardrum, ossicles and cochlea, the frequency-sorting membrane and the hair cells, the place and frequency theories of pitch and the volley principle, sensorineural loss, sound localisation, the cocktail party and McGurk effects, phonemic restoration and the endless Shepard tone.

The third pack is the other senses: proprioception and balance and the spinning canals, motion sickness, the gate-control theory of pain and referred pain, the smell system and the smell-triggered memory, loss of smell, the fifth taste and supertasters, the chilli-and-mint facial sense and capsaicin, synaesthesia and pareidolia, phantom phone buzzes and tinnitus, two-point touch, the rubber hand and the thermal grill.

The fourth pack is perceptual organisation: the Gestalt grouping laws of closure, proximity and common fate, figure and ground, constancy and size constancy, the binocular depth cues of disparity and convergence, the one-eyed cues of motion parallax, interposition, linear and aerial perspective and texture gradient, and the illusions of the Moon, Mueller-Lyer, Ponzo, the Ames room, the hollow face and the checker shadow.

The fifth pack is attention, learning and extremes: top-down processing and perceptual set, selective attention, inattentional and change blindness, the attentional blink, automaticity and priming, adaptation to prism goggles, the visual cliff, the motion and autokinetic aftereffects, the featureless Ganzfeld, the uncanny valley, the ventriloquist and sound-flash effects, categorical perception, eidetic and iconic memory, and the old doctrine of specific nerve energies.

The wrong answers are always other structures, theories, illusions or effects of the same kind. About forty of the hundred questions carry a photograph of a neutral object, a model eye or ear, an eye chart, a tuning fork, a model brain or a microscope, chosen because every option is the same sort of thing and the picture cannot point to any of them. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.