This document discusses sensation and perception. It distinguishes between sensation, which is the input of sensory information, and perception, which involves selecting, organizing and interpreting sensory information. The major sensory systems - vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, balance and body movement - are described along with their receptors and the type of sensory information received. Psychophysics is introduced as the study of the relationship between physical stimuli and a person's experience of them. Key concepts in perception like attention, feature detection, habituation, constancy, gestalt principles, interpretation factors and subliminal perception are also outlined.

1. SENSATION AND
PERCEPTION

2. 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

3. Sensation
• Input of sensory information
• Process of receiving, converting, and
transmitting information from the outside
world

4. Sensory Systems
• Vision
• Hearing
• Smell (olfaction)
• Taste (gustation)
• Vestibular sense (balance)
• Kinethesis (body movement)
• Touch (pressure, pain, temperature)

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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)

9. 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

10. 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

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

12. 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

13. Perception-Key Concepts
1. Selection
2. Organization
3. Interpretation
4. Subliminal perception and ESP

14. 1. Three Major Factors of
Selection
• Selective attention
• Feature detectors
• Habituation

15. 2. Organization
• Form (Gestalt)
• Constancy(size, shape, color, brightness)
• Depth
• Color

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

17. Gestalt Psychology: Form
• figure ground
• proximity
• closure
• contiguity
• similarity

18. Constancy
• Size constancy
• Shape constancy
• Color constancy
• Brightness constancy

19. 3. Four Major Factors of
Interpretation
• Perceptual adaptation
• Perceptual set
• Individual motivation
• Frame of reference

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

21. 4. Extrasensory Perception (ESP)
• Alleged perception in the absence of
sensory data
• Types of ESP - telepathy, precognition,
clairvoyance, and psychokinesis