Perception Unit UbD 

AP Psychology
Laura Stoughton
The Taft School

Stage 1 – Desired Results

Unit-level understanding(s) Essential Question(s)

Students will understand that:
We can never know the outside world
directly; we ​construct​ our subjective
realities with the limited tools and
information that we have
● How do we come to know anything about our
world? While the brain is the organ that can
make sense of outside stimuli and turn them
into conscious experience, the brain also has
no direct way to come in contact with these
stimuli. How do our sensory organs help get
info from the outside in?
● How can our senses be fooled?

Prior knowledge, skills, and understandings:

(What do students know, what can they do, and what do they care about with regard to these understandings?)

● Students will need to know the structure of the neuron and explain how they communicate messages

● Students need a rough understanding of the division between the central and peripheral nervous
systems

● Students should be familiar with functional anatomy, particularly the occipital lobe, auditory cortex, and
thalamus

● Previous exposure to waves/wave properties (electromagnetic vs compression, amplitude, frequency)

from physics will be helpful

● Students will draw on their own personal experiences as museum-goers to brainstorm what makes an
exhibit effective or ineffective

Student objectives (outcomes):

(these are the stated learning objectives for this unit by the College Board)

Students will be able to….

● Discuss basic principles of sensory transduction, including absolute threshold, difference threshold,
signal detection, and sensory adaptation

● Describe sensory processes (e.g. hearing, vision, touch, taste, smell, vestibular, kinesthesis, pain),
including the specific nature of energy transduction, relevant anatomical structures, and specialized
pathways in the brain for each of the senses
 ● Explain common sensory disorders (e.g. visual and hearing impairments)

● Describe general principles of organizing and integrating sensation to promote stable awareness of the
external world (e.g., Gestalt principles, depth perception)

● Discuss how experience and culture can influence perceptual processes (e.g. perceptual set, context
effects)

● Explain the role of top-down processing in producing vulnerability to illusion

● Discuss the role of attention in behavior

● Challenge common beliefs in parapsychological phenomena

● Identify the major historical figures in sensation and perception (e.g. Gustav Fechner, David Hubel and
Torsten Wiesel, and Ernst Weber

Stage 2 – Assessment Evidence

Performance Task(s): ​(bigger assessments) Other Evidence: ​(smaller and/or informal

assessments)
● Museum exhibit design project​ (likely evaluated
on a similar framework that Tim Best uses)
● AP-style Free Response Question
● Student-written test (for my inquiry project)
including concept map or outline of unit
● Battle of the Senses (students fill out and
justify/defend a bracket of 8 senses to
answer the question: if you could only keep
one sense, which would it be?)
● Teacher-written quiz halfway through
● Homework: imagine you are a photon.
Describe your journey from the visual
stimulus to a person’s conscious experience
of that stimulus

○ Could do the same thing with an air

molecule for sound

● Another homework where they have to

identify the sensation/perception principle
relevant to each of 6 scenarios

● Whiteboarding exercises in class as retrieval

practice and formative assessment

Stage 3 – Learning Plan

Learning Activities:

● Lectures will include pictures and videos of exhibits in the Franklin Institute’s brain exhibit to discuss as
examples of museum design (since we can’t do an actual field trip there. We could go to the CT Science
 Center, but they don’t have a great brain section or particularly good exhibit design)

● Demos! This unit has so many demos that will give the students an idea of how they can make their
exhibits ​interactive
○ Mindfulness demo with Febreeze for sensory adaptation
○ Selective attention: multiple object tracking demo
○ Inattentional blindness: Invisible gorilla video
○ Change blindness: catching continuity errors in movies
○ Absolute threshold: sound detection
○ Just noticeable difference demo
○ Lots of visual illusions (aftereffects)
○ Color perception and culture
○ Context effects: phonemic restoration
○ Perceptual set: discussing “The Dress”
○ Perceptual adaptation goggles
○ Supertaster test
○ Sensory interactions: jellybeans for smell + taste = flavor

● In-class group activity for general sensation/perception principles: on chart paper, design a
“superpower:” a new sense and apply relevant vocabulary to describe how it would work (stimulus,
transduction, absolute threshold, peripheral/central nervous system, etc)