implest form of learning, allows the individual to become accustomed to a repeated stimulus, thereby allowing him or her to respond more quickly to new situations or problems. Classical conditioning, pioneered by Pavlov's experiments with dogs, demonstrates how an unrelated stimulus (UR) can come to provoke a reliable conditioned response (CR). Operant or instrumental conditioning describes a process of learning in which a specific behavior produces a specific response. In both cases, researchers can teach a subject to connect two or more otherwise unrelated elements (bells and the act of salivating, pushing a lever and the arrival of food) in an association where none existed before.
CHAPTER 5 The brain gathers information about the outside world through the five senses. When a distal stimulus becomes a proximal stimulus, contacting one or more of the individual's sensory processes, the result is a sensation of some sort. Scientists have studied this activity in efforts to understand the effects of phenomenon such as the different impacts of a strong stimulus versus a weak one, as well as the biological basis for each of the sensory processes. The most intensely studied of the five senses is vision, the process whereby light is translated by the eye which is then transferred to the brain to become an image. This understanding provides the starting point for comprehending how sensory information is then processed, catalogued, and made use of by the mind.
CHAPTER 6 Perception is the way in which the brain processes information received from sensory stimuli. In the case of visual perception, this requires the brain to perform visual search tasks and visual segregation that tries to make sense of what is seen by comparing it with patterns and structures it has already processed and sorted. Two-dimensional art provides some interesting examples of how this activity works. For example, the use of forced perspective allows a...