What's covered
Key facts
Attention and focus
Attention is how your brain chooses what to focus on out of everything around you.
How expectation shapes what we see
Your brain does not just copy what your eyes see; it makes a clever guess about what is really there.
Optical illusions
The brain fills in missing parts of a scene using what it expects to be there.
Sensation vs perception
The brain, not the eyes or ears, does the perceiving by interpreting the messages sent to it.
The five senses
The eye does not detect sound or smell; it detects light.
Attention and focus
Your brain can only process a limited amount of information at any one time.
How expectation shapes what we see
The same shape can look like a letter or a number depending on the words or numbers around it.
Optical illusions
With an ambiguous picture you usually see only one image at a time, not both at once.
Sensation vs perception
Perception is when your brain organises and makes sense of the signals your senses detect.
The five senses
The five main senses are sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste.
Sample questions
A taste of the 45 questions in this topic, answers marked. Sign up to practise the full set with spaced repetition.
Which term best describes attention?
- ✓Choosing what your brain focuses on
- •Sending messages to your muscles
- •Storing memories for a long time
- •Turning sounds into vibrations
Which best describes what the brain does when we see something?
- •Copies the image exactly like a camera
- •Ignores what we already know
- ✓Makes a clever guess about what is there
- •Stores every detail without changing it
What is an optical illusion?
- •When a picture changes shape on the page
- •When light fails to reach the retina at all
- ✓When the brain sees something differently from reality
- •When the eyes become permanently damaged by light
What is perception?
- •When a signal is changed into an electrical message by receptors
- •When you stop noticing a signal that has not changed for a while
- ✓When your brain organises and makes sense of signals your senses detect
- •When your sense organs detect a signal from the outside world
Which sense organ is used for sight?
- •The ears
- ✓The eyes
- •The nose
- •The skin
What is divided attention?
- •Choosing to ignore everything around you
- •Focusing on just one thing and ignoring the rest
- •Remembering many facts at the same time
- ✓Trying to focus on more than one thing at once
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