Sensation & Perception Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the depth cue that comes from how far the two eyes have to turn inward to point at the same near object, so that the brain, sensing the pull on the eye muscles, judges an object that requires a strong cross-eyed turn to be close?

Question 2

What is the name for the condition in which a stimulus in one sense automatically and reliably triggers an experience in another, so that a person may see a fixed colour for each letter or number, taste words, or feel that the days of the week are laid out in space around them?

Question 3

What is the name for the roughly one hundred and twenty million receptors in the retina that are extremely sensitive to dim light and carry night vision and side vision, but do not signal colour and give only a coarse, low-detail picture?

Question 4

What is the name for the explanation of pitch which says that the pitch of a sound is signalled by the RATE at which the inner-ear membrane and the hearing nerve fire, matching the number of pressure waves per second, an account that works for lower-pitched sounds?

Question 5

What is the name for the powerful effect in which the inside, scooped-out surface of a face mask is seen as a normal face bulging outward toward you, and appears to turn and follow you as you move, because the brain's deep expectation that faces stick out overrides the actual depth information?

Question 6

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 7

What is the name for the tendency to see a meaningful familiar pattern, above all a face, in random or ambiguous shapes, such as a man in the Moon, animals in clouds, or a face on a burnt piece of toast or the surface of Mars?

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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.