Chapter 12

Sensation and Perception

Sensation and perception are two important concepts in psychology. Sensation refers to the
arousal of a sense organ by something in the environment. Perception refers to the interpretation
of this sensation.

The senses

Human beings have five senses:

1. Seeing 4. Smell
2. Hearing 5. Taste
3. Touch

This senses are able to respond to very low amount of stimulation. Many people are so sensitive to
the senses that for example can feel a wing of a fly falling from their cheek.

Thresholds:

Absolute threshold is the minimum amount of a stimulus that a subject can detect. It is the lowest
intensity of a sound a person can hear.

Difference threshold is the amount of change necessary to detect a just-noticeable difference 50

percent of the time.

Perceptions:

Perception is the way in which we interpret a sensation, but they are not just mirrored images of
the world around us and there are several reasons for this like:

1. We are not able to sense everything in the world around us.

2. We sometimes perceive stimuli that do not exist in our physical environment.
3. Our expectation influence our perceptual experience.
4. Our perception is based on changes in sensations

Our perception is bases on changes of stimuli that make up the figure, as well as changes in
outside stimuli.

Subliminal perception

Stimuli may be so weak that we are not aware of the sensations they are arousing. But our
perception of them may influence our thought or behavior. Subliminal perception is the
perception of sensation aroused by stimuli that are too weak for an individual to report.

There are many variables that affect successful subliminal stimulation such as:

1. Strength of stimulation 3. The nature of the stimulation

2. Speed at which the stimulus is give immediately after the subliminal
stimulation. 4. General train of thought of the
viewer at the time.
Psychologist question if the subliminal stimulation can be effective in influencing behavior.
Stimulation that we are aware of is more effective in influencing behavior than subliminal
stimulation.

Attention

We are surrounded by stimuli, but is impossible to react to all of them. Therefore, we became
selective and a certain stimuli gain our attention.

Attention is the process of focusing your perception on a limited number of stimuli. In this case we
purposely decide which stimuli to pay attention. But sometimes stimuli just break in us.

The stimuli

There are certain characteristic that makes us pay attention to a stimuli such as:

 Intensity
 Size
 Contrast
 Movement
 Changes
 Novelty
 Repetition

The individual

Another factor that affect our reaction to a stimulus is the condition of the individual at the time.
The need, attitudes, expectations, motives and past experiences of a person play large role in
determining which stimuli we would pay more attention.

Maintaining attention:

Once our attention is focused on a particular stimulus, the stimulus characteristic can be used to
hold our attention.

Vision:

The physical nature of color

There are three basic term that used in describing color. These are hue, brightness, and saturation.

 Hue: refers to the quality of redness. Blueness, yellowness, or greenness that

differentiates one color from another.
The complete arrangement of hues that can be seen by the human eye is the visible
spectrum. It is arranged according to the length of the light waves. The spectrum has
violet on one end and red on the other. There are no sharp dividing lines between the
colors of the spectrum, instead they blend into another.
  Brightness: refers to the sensation of lightness or darkness of any color or gray. As hues
approach white at the top of the color solid, they become lighter and lighter. The lighter
the color the brighter it is.
 Saturation: refers to the pureness of a hue and it refers to the degree t which a hue differs
from a gray of the same brightness.

Color combination:

Colors that are opposite to each other on the color circle are complementary colors. A
combination of two colors is pleasing if the colors are complementary to each other. But if three
colors are to be combined picking three colors that are equal distance on the wheel color will give
you a pleasing combination. Saturation is a factor in choosing pleasing color combination.

Colorblindness:

There are some people who cannot distinguish all the colors that most of us can. This people are
said to have colorblindness or are color-weak, or color-deficient. There two types of
colorblindness:

 Total colorblindness: the world appears like a black and white uncolored film.
 Red-green colorblindness: this people can still distinguish blue, yellow. To the red-green
colorblind person, a scene all in blue and yellow would appear just the same as black and
white.

How do we perceive distance from depth?

We can perceive depth as well as length and width when we use only one eye. Certain muscles
cause the lens of the eyes to become flatter as an object moves into the distance. One way of
perceiving distance is the convergence and the position of the object. We also use movement to
determine the distance and depth. We can also use texture gradient that is the amount of detail
perceived in an object. Other aids are linear and atmospheric perspective.

 Linear perspective: the farther away objects are, the closer together they appear to be.
 Atmospheric perspective: objects that are blurred or hazy from smoke or dust in the air
appear to be farther away.

Optical illusions:

A false visual perception is an optical illusion. We us optical illusions in clothing, ordinary movie
and television pictures area optical illusions, advertisers of use optical illusions to attract attention.

Perceptual patterns:

 Proximity: is one factor that influence perception because we tend to group objects if they
are closed together
 Similarity: we tend to group objects that resemble each other
 Closure: our brains fills in the gasp to make an object seen complete.

Hearing:
Hearing is the second most important sense. Sound determines what we hear. As with color, there
are terms that are used to categorize sound:

 Pitch: refers to the highness or lowness of a sound.}

 Tone: a sound with a clearly marked pitch.
 Loudness: is the intensity of a sound.
 Timbre: refers to the distinct quality of tones.

The problem of noise:

Noise is caused by vibrations in the air. The sensation of noise is simulated by sound waves of
irregular frequencies, irregular sounds are more annoying han steady ones.

Deafness:

Deafness usually refers to a condition of people who are hard of hearing. They cannot detect faint
sounds.

Other senses fields.

The other sense field that help influence our perception includes:

 Smell: come from receptors in the upperpart of the nose.

 Taste: related to smell. Much of the taste in food comes from smell.
 Skin senses: they are sensitive to cold, warmth, pain, or pressure.
 The kinesthetic sense: it determines the body movement and position
 Equilibrium: tells where the body is in space.