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
