Sensation & Perception Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the step, carried out by every sensory receptor, of converting a physical stimulus such as light, sound waves, pressure or a chemical into the electrical nerve signals that the brain can work with?

Question 2

What is the name for the two clues, both depending on having two ears, that the brain uses to work out the direction a sound is coming from around the horizon: the tiny difference in when the sound reaches each ear, and the difference in loudness as the head casts a sound shadow?

Question 3

What is the name for the transparent, flexible structure just behind the coloured part of the eye that is squeezed thicker or pulled thinner by a ring of muscle to bring near or far objects into sharp focus on the light-sensitive back layer, an adjustment called accommodation?

Question 4

What is the name for the explanation of how pitch is sensed which says that the pitch of a sound is signalled by WHICH region along the inner-ear membrane vibrates the most, an account that works well for higher-pitched sounds?

Question 5

What is the name for the smallest change in a stimulus that a person can notice half of the time, also called the just-noticeable-difference: how much heavier one weight must be than another, or how much brighter one light, before the two can be told apart?

Question 6

What is the name for the account of colour vision, put forward by Hering, that says colour is carried by three channels working as opposed pairs, red against green, blue against yellow, and black against white, which explains why no colour ever looks reddish-green and why staring at red gives a green afterimage?

Question 7

What is the name for the idea that groups of hearing-nerve fibres fire in staggered turns, like soldiers in ranks reloading, so that although no one fibre can keep up with a high-frequency sound, the combined firing of the group can follow 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.