• How other senses are like vision and hearing:

1. Position and Movement:

 To move gracefully we need to know where are limbs are:
• Vestibular sense: orients us w/ respect to gravity
o Tells us where we are moving or how our movement is
changing
• Kinesthetic sense: keeps track of boy parts relative to each other
o Reseptors for kinesthetic lie in joints, muscles and tendons.
2. Smell:
 Sense of smell, olfaction,
• Odors interact w/ receptor associated w/ specialized hairs in the
nose, they convey info to brain, where sensation of smell is
realized. The olfactory bulbs (where the odor stimulus is) can be
found on the underside of the brain just below frontal lobes
3. Taste:
 Sense based on chemistry
 Sense of taste and smell have a cooperative working relationship
 Sense of taste 9gustation) four main qualities  sweet, sour, bitter, salty.
More recent quality is call umami. The falvor associated with MSG, found
in Asian food
 Receptors are gathered in taste buds, they cluster together in papillae
 A specialized nerve carries nothing but taste messages to the brain
 Infants have high taste sensitivity
 Taste sensors can be easily damaged by alcohol, smoke, acids or hot
foods. But they are frequently replaced
4. Skin Senses:
 Skin senses are connected to the somatosensory cortext located in the
brains parietal lobes.
 Skins sensity varies based on number of receptors in each area.
 Touch plays a central rol in human relationship. Skin sensitivity affects
touch.
 Touch also serves as a primary stimulus for sexual arousal in humans. And
it is essential for healthy mental and physical development
• Psychology In Your Life: The experience of Pain:
1. -When in severe pain, nothing else matters
2. -Severe pain dominates all other sensations  persistent pain can even lead to
suicide
3. Pain is the part of the body’s adaptive mechanism that makes you respond to
conditions that threaten damage to the body
4. Pain can be caused from sensation, but in cases such as phantom limbs, it is a
result of sensations arising in the brain itself
• The Gate Control Theory:
1. Melzack and wall’s gate-control theory explains why pain can sometimes be
blocked by analgesic drugs, competing stimuli, as in acupuncture and even by the
mere expectation of treatment effects.
  The proposal asserts that pain depends on amount of “traffic” in two
different sensory pathways
• 1 route (consisting of neurons with fatty myelin covering their
axons) handles message quickly: these fast fibers deliver most
sensory info to brain
• 2 route (consisting of fibers w/o the fatty sheaths on axons) sends
message very slowly
 melzack and Wall hypothesize that competing messages from the fast
fibers can block pain messages in the slow fibers
• The fast fibers can close a “spinal gate”, preventing slow fiber
messages from reaching the brain
 The gate itself operates in a brain stem region called the periaqueductal
gray (PAG)
• Exact mechanism of PAG is unknown, but it is known that pain-
blocking opiates and endorphins act on the PAG where they causen
inhibitory neuros to stop pain messages ascending in the spinal
cord.
2. Pain signals that pass through the gate are routed to the anterior cingulated cortex
(located around frontal lobes- controls pain)
3. Spinal gate can be operated top-down by psychological factors
• Dealing with Pain:
1. Pain serves as an essential defense signal: it warns us of potential harm, and it
helps us to survive in hostile environments
2. Many over the counter drugs can be used to deal with pain: but have unwanted
side effects:
 Addiction or damage to digestive track
3. People learn to control pain by psychological techniques such as hypnosis,
relaxation, thought0distraction procedures
4. Placebo medicine also cures pain
 The expectiation of pain relief is enough to cause the brain to release
painkilling endorphins
 It is likely that endorphins are responsible for pain-relieving effects of
acupuncture
• Pain Tolerance:
1. The threshold of pain varies enormously from person to person.
2. An experiment found that brain scans of people who are highly sensitive to pain
show greater activation of the thalamus and the anterior cingulated cortex than
scans of those with greater pain tolerance
• What is the relationship between sensation and Perception?
• Perceptual Processing: Finding Meaning in Sensation:
1. Feature Detectors: Brain cells that operate on the front lines of perceptual
processing
 Our brains have specialized groups of cells dedicated to the detection
of specific stimulus features such as length, slant, color
  Part of the occipital lobe contains cells that are sensitive to features of
the human face called feature detectors
 Binding problem: it is unknown how the brain combines the multiple
features it detects into a single percept of a face or any object
 It is known that the brain apparently synchronizes the firing patterns in
different groups of neurons that have each detected features of an
object
2. Bottom-Up and Top-Down processing:
 Perception involves taking sensory data through receptors and sending
it “upward” to the cortex
 It is these initial characterisitics analyzed there that determine how we
finally perceive and object or event
 ^^^that process is known as the Bottom-up process^^
 A complementary process occurs simultaneously at the “top” level of
the cerebral cortext
 Top-down processing invokes a perceivers goals, past experience,
knowledge, expectations, memory in the interpretation of an object or
event
• Ex. : What foods will satisfy my hunger?
3. Perceptual Constancies:
 When an object is distorted from being open, you “known” the shape
of the object, but your sensory image distorts it when you are not
looking at it straight on. Your brain auto corrects it
 Being able to see a shape from different angles or distances is called
perceptual constancy
• Perceptual Ambiguity and Distortion
1. What illusions tell us about sensation and perception
 Illusion occurs when your mind deceives you by interpreting a
stimulus pattern in a manner that is demonstrably incorrect
• Occur when info is missing, unclear, elements are combined in
unusual ways
 To study illusions at the level of perception, psychologist use
ambiguous figures or stimulus patterns that can be interpreted in two
or more distinct ways
• Theoretical Explanations for Perception:
1. Gestalt Theory:
 From the raw material of stimulation, the brain forms a perceptual
whole that is more than the mere sum of its sensory parts
 We perceive a square as a single figure, not four individual lines
2. Figure and Ground
 One of the most baic perceptual processes by Gestalt divides our
perceptual experience into figure and ground
• Figure- a pattern that grabs attention
• Ground- everything else
  Figure example- melody
Ground- spicy slice of pepperoni on cheese pizza
3. Closure: filling in the blanks
 Where this division occurs you perceive subjective contours:
boundaries that exist not in the stimulus but only in the subjective
experience of your mind
 Closure makes you see in complete figures as wholes by supplying the
missing segments, filling in gaps, and making inferences about
potentially hidden objects.
4. The Gestalt laws of perceptual grouping:
 By varying a single factor and observing how it affected a simple
figure, Max Wertheimer was able to formulate a set of Laws of
perceptual grouping  which he inferred were in the neural fabric of
the brain
 Law of similarity: we group things together that have a similar look
 Law of proximity (Wetheimer’s law)- we group things together that
are near each other
 Law of Continuity- (gestalt)- we prefer smoothly connected and
continuous figures to disjointed ones
 Law of Common Fate- when you picture a group of something moving
together, you perceive them as a signle Gestalt. Such as a school of
fish
 Law of Pragnanz “meaningfulness”- states that we perceive the
simplest pattern possible, the percept requiring the last mental effort
• The Nature of Depth perception:
1. Depth perception appears early, but danger in falling develops later in infancy
 Crawling helps infants develop their 3-D world
2. Binocular Cues: information taken in by both eyes aid in depth perception
 Binocular convergence suggest how the lines of vision from each eye
converge at different angles on objects at different distances
 Retinal disparity- arises from the difference in perspectives of the two
eyes.
3. Monocular Cues for depth perception:
 Relative size of familiar objects
 Light and shadow work as a distance cue
 Interposition- partially hidden objects are more distant that object that
hide them
 Relative motion
 Atmospheric perspective-objects that are fuzzy, less distinct or
invisible due to environment like fog
• Learning based inference: the nurture of perception:
1. Learning-based inference: emphasizes how ppl use piror learning to interpret
new sensory information
 Learning makes guesses or inferences
  The most important factors in forming an accurate percept include
context, expectations and perceptual set
2. Context and Expectations:
 Once you identify a context, you form expectations about what
persons, objects and events you are likely to experience
 Context is an enormously useful cue to identify ambiguous stimuli,
such as recognizing objects in a dimly lit room
3. Perceptual Set:
 we have a readiness to notice and respond to a certain stimulus cues
4. Cultural Influences on Perception:
 People’s experiences affect their perceptions
 Our perceptual processes show the influence of both nature and
nurture.
 Attention is a key component of sensation and perception- without
nothing will be absorbed or noticed