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Sensation & Perception
Basic Principles
What is Sensation?
- The process by which a stimulated receptor creates a pattern of neural messages
that represent the stimulus in the brain, giving rise to our initial experience of the
stimulus.
Transduction
- The job of the sensory receptors to convert incoming stimuli information into
electrochemical signals
- Transduction: the sensory process that converts energy, such as light or sound
waves, into the form of neural messages
Sensory Adaptation
- Sensation is critically influenced by change
- Their receptors specialize in gathering information about new and changing events
- The diminishing responsiveness of our sensory systems to prolonged stimulus
- Unless it is quite intense or painful, stimulation that persists without change in
intensity usually shifts to the background of our awareness
Selective Attention
- Sensation
o From environment
- Perception
o Interpret
- Bottom-up processing
- Top-down processing
o Experiences or expectation
- Inattentional Blindness
o Plain sight
- Change blindness
o People don’t notice changes in their environment
- Cocktail party effect
o Someone can focus on a single conversation in a noisy environment
Thresholds
- Absolute threshold
o The minimum intensity that a person can detect
- Signal detection theory
o How people can respond to stimuli with background noise
- Subliminal
o People are not aware of the stimulus but it can influence behaviors
- Priming
o Seeing one stimulus influences how a person reacts to a different stimulus
Difference Thresholds
- Difference threshold
o Just noticeable
o The smallest amount by which a stimulus can be changed and the difference
be detected, half of the time
- Weber’s Law
o The smallest detectable difference between two stimuli is a constant
proportion
- Fechner’s Law
o Expresses the relationship between the actual magnitude of the stimulus
and its perceived magnitude
Sensation & Perception
What is perception?
- A mental process that elaborates and assigns meaning to the incoming sensory
patterns
o Creates an interpretation of sensation
The Eye
- Pupil
- Iris
o Muscle
- Lens
- Retina
o Rods
▪ Black and white
o Cones
▪ Color
o Optic nerve
- Accommodation
- Fovea
o Flips items around
o Has the highest concentration of rods and cones
- Optic nerve
o The bundle of neurons that carries the visual information from the retina to
the brain
- Blind spot
o The point where the optic nerve exits the eye and where there are no
photoreceptors
Photoreceptors
- Light-sensitive cells in the retina that convert light energy into neural energy
o Rods: photoreceptors that are especially sensitive to dim light, but not color
o Cones: photoreceptors that are especially sensitive to colors but not dim
light
Receptors in the Eye
Cones Rods
Number 6 million 120 million
Location in Retina Cones Peripheral
Color Sensitivity High Low
Detail Sensitivity Low High
Light Low High
Color Vision
- Color-deficient vision
- Young-Helmholtz Trichromatic (three-color) theory
- Opponent-process theory
Hearing
What is Hearing?
- The vibrational energy of vibrating objects, such as guitar strings, transfer the
surrounding medium-air as the vibrating objects push the molecules of the medium
back and forth
Sound Waves
- Frequency
o The rate of sound wave cycles that determines pitch
o The number of cycles completed by a wave in a given amount of time
- Pitch
o The perceptual experience of sound’s highness or lowness
o The physical strength of a wave (volume)
The Ear
- Middle ear
- Cochlea
o Snail shaped
- Inner ear
o Basilar Membrane
Deafness
- There are generally two types of deafness
o Conduction deafness: an inability to hear, resulting from damage to the
structures of the middle or inner ear
o Nerve deafness (sensorineural deafness): an inability to hear, linked to a
deficit in the body’s ability to transmit impulses from the cochlea to the brain
Pitch Perception
- Place Theory
o The brain interprets a sound’s pitch based on the specific location along the
basilar membrane
- Frequency Theory
o Pitch is determines by the rate at which neurons in the auditory nerve fire in
response to sound waves
Hearing Loss
- Sensorineural Hearing Loss
o Occurs due to damage to inner ear
- Conduction Hearing Loss
o Cause by a problem in the conduction pathway of sound
- Cochlear Implants
o A surgically implanted device that bypasses the damaged hair cells in the
inner ear
Pain, Smell, & Taste
Touch
- Identifiable “touch” receptors
o Mixed bag pressure
- Kinesthesis
o Eyes
- Vestibular sense
- Skin senses are also connected to the somatosensory cortex
- The skin’s sensitivity is stimulation varies tremendously over the body, depending on
the number of receptors in each area
Pain
- Gate-control theory
o There are gates in the spinal cord that open or close to allow or block pain
signals
- Biopsychosocial approach to pain
o Emphasized the interconnectedness of biological, psychological, and social
factors in understanding and treating health and illness
Taste
- Gustation
- Specialized nerves carry nothing but the taste messages to the brain
- What makes up taste?
o Sweet
o Salty
o Sour
o Bitter
o Unami
- Can easily be damaged by alcohol, smoke, acids, or hot foods
Smell
- Olfaction
- Odors first interact with receptor proteins associated with hair in the nose
o Convey information to the brain’s olfactory bulbs, located on the underside
of the brain
Position and Movement
- Vestibular sense: the sense of body orientation with respect to gravity
- Kinesthetic sense: keeps track of body parts, relative to each other
Perception
What is perception?
- A mental process that elaborates and assigns meaning to the incoming sensory
patterns
Bottom-Up and Top-Down
- Bottom-up processing: analysis that emphasizes the characteristics of the stimuli
rather than our concepts and expectations
- Top-down processing: analysis that emphasizes the perceiver’s expectations,
concept memories and other cognitive factors, rather than individual characteristics
Perceptual Consistency
- The ability to recognize the same object as remaining “constant” under changing
conditions is called perceptual consistency
The Gestalt Principles
- Gestalt Psychologists argue that the brain forms a perceptual whole that is more
than the mere sum of its sensory
- Law of Similarity: We tend to group similar objects together in our perceptions
- Law of Proximity: We tend to group objects together when they are near each other
- Law of Continuity: We prefer perceptions of connected and continuous figures to
disconnected and disjointed ones
- Law of Common Fate: We tend to group similar objects together that share a
common motion or destination
- Law of Pragnanz: The simplest organization, requiring the least cognitive effort, will
emerge as the figure
- Grouping (proximity similarity, continuity, connectedness, closure)
Figure Ground
- Focus
Depth Perception
- Visual cliff
o Tells us the ability to perceive depth emerges around the age an infant begins
to crawl
- Binocular cues
o Visual signals that require the use of both eyes to perceive depth and
distance
- Retinal disparity
o A visual cue that helps us perceive depth and distance
Motion Perception & Perceptual Constancy
- Phi Phenomenon
o An optical illusion where stationary objects viewed in rapid succession
appear to be in motion
- Perceptual constancy
o The ability of the human brain to perceive objects as having consistent
properties despite changes in the sensory input
- Color constancy
o A psychological phenomenon where a person perceives an object as having
the same color despite changes in its illumination or lighting conditions
Perceptual Set
- A readiness to detect a particular stimulus in a given situation
- Perceptual adaptation
o The brain’s ability to adjust to changes in sensory input, leading to a change
in perception
- Perceptual Sets
o Context effects
▪ Our prior experiences and expectations, shaped by surrounding
context, influence how we interpret ambiguous stimuli
o Cultural effects
▪ Influencing what people are primed to see and how they interpret it,
shaping their expectations, attention, and understanding of the world
- Emotion and motivation
Extrasensory Perception
- ESP
o The ability to perceive information beyond that known senses, such as
telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition
- Parapsychology
o The study of mental phenomena which are excluded from or inexplicable by
orthodox scientific psychology