SENSATION AND PERCEPTION

KEY POINTS

• Distinguish between sensation and perception• Psychophysics: absolute threshold and difference

threshold• Identify each major sensory system, their

receptors, and type of sensory information each receives

• Perception: selection, organization and interpretation

Sensation

• Input of sensory information

• Process of receiving, converting, and transmitting information from the outside world

Sensory Systems

• Vision

• Hearing

• Smell (olfaction)

• Taste (gustation)

• Vestibular sense (balance)

• Kinethesis (body movement)

• Touch (pressure, pain, temperature)

Vision

• Visual receptor cells located on retina:rods for night vision and cones for color vision

• The eye captures light and focuses it on the visual receptors, which convert light energy to neural impulses sent to the brain

Hearing

• Audition (hearing) occurs via sound waves, which result from rapid changes in air pressure caused by vibrating objects

• Receptors located in the inner ear (cochlea) tiny hair cells that convert sound energy to neural impulses sent along to brain

Smell and Taste

• Olfaction (smell) receptors are located at top of nasal cavity

• Gustation - (taste) receptors are taste buds on tongue. Four basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour and bitter

Body Senses

• Vestibular sense (sense of balance) results from receptors in inner ear

• Kinethesis - (body posture, orientation, and body movement) results from receptors in muscles, joint and tendons

• Skin senses detect touch (pressure, temperature and pain)

Processing

• Sensory reduction - filtering and analyzing of sensations before messages are sent to the brain

• Transduction - process of converting receptor energy into neural impulses the brain can understand

• Adaptation- decreased sensory response to continuous stimuli

Psychophysics

• Study of the relationship between the physical properties of stimuli and a person’s experience of them

• Absolute threshold - minimum amount of energy we can detect

• Difference threshold - (jnd) the smallest change in a stimulus we can detect

Perception

• “…a constructive process by which we go beyond the stimuli that are presented to us and attempt to construct a meaningful situation”.

Perceptual Processing

• Top-down: perception is guided by higher-level knowledge, experience, expectations, and motivations

• Bottom-up: perception that consists of recognizing and processing information about the individual components of the stimuli

Perception-Key Concepts

1. Selection

2. Organization

3. Interpretation

4. Subliminal perception and ESP

1. Three Major Factors of Selection

• Selective attention

• Feature detectors

• Habituation

2. Organization

• Form (Gestalt)

• Constancy(size, shape, color, brightness)

• Depth

• Color

Gestalt Principles

• Rules that summarize how we tend to organize bits and pieces of information into meaningful wholes

Gestalt Psychology: Form

• figure ground

• proximity

• closure

• contiguity

• similarity

Constancy

• Size constancy

• Shape constancy

• Color constancy

• Brightness constancy

3. Four Major Factors of Interpretation

• Perceptual adaptation

• Perceptual set

• Individual motivation

• Frame of reference

Subliminal Perception

• Stimuli that occur below the threshold of our conscious awareness but have a weak, if any effect on behavior

4. Extrasensory Perception (ESP)

• Alleged perception in the absence of sensory data

• Types of ESP - telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis