Sensation and Perception

Sensation
• Sensation:
• Our first awareness of some outside
stimulus.
• Outside stimulus activates sensory
receptors, which in turn produce
electrical signals that are transformed by
the brain into meaningless bits of
information
• Perception: is the process of selecting,
organizing and interpreting sensory
information so that it makes sense.
Information Flow in Senses

• Stimulus : Change of
energy in the environment,
such as light waves, sound
waves, mechanical pressure,
or chemicals
• Transduction : Change
physical energy into
electrical signals.
• Brain: Impulses from
senses first go to different
primary areas of the brain
 Sensory Thresholds
• Becoming aware of a stimulus
• Gustav Fechner defined the absolute
threshold as the smallest amount of
stimulus energy (such as sound or light)
that can be observed or experienced
• Absolute threshold :The intensity level of
a stimulus such that a person will have a
50% chance of detecting it.
• Subliminal stimulus :Has an intensity that
gives a person less than a 50% chance of
detecting the stimulus
Sensory Thresholds
Difference Threshold or Just Noticeable
Difference

• Minimal difference that can be detected

between two similar stimuli
• Weber’s law
• The increase in intensity of a stimulus
needed to produce a just noticeable
difference grows in proportion to the
intensity of the initial stimulus.
Difference Threshold or Just Noticeable
Difference
 Perception and Illusion

• Perception is the right interpretation of

sensation
• Illusion is the wrong interpretation of
sensations
• Illusion
• A perceptual experience in which you
perceive an image as being so strangely
distorted that, in reality, it cannot and
does not exist
Illusions
 Perception Process

• The process by which people select, organize,

interpret, and respond to stimuli.

• Perception (consciously and unconsciously)

involves searching for, obtaining, and
processing information in the mind in an
attempt to make sense of the world
 Perception Functions

• Attention (Selective): a decision must be

made about which incoming information is to
be further processed, and which is to be
discarded.
• Localization: The system must be able to
determine where objects of interest are.
• Recognition: the perceptual system must be
able to determine which objects are out there.
• Abstraction: the system must be able to
abstract the critical features of a recognized
object.
• Perceptual constancy: The perceptual system
must maintain certain inherent features of
objects.
 Selective Attention
• We can only pay
attention to one
aspect of the object
at a time
• Inattentional effect
• Cocktail Party effect
 Attention

Attention and Filtering

• External Attention Factors: Intensity, Size,
Repetition, Motion, Novelty & Familiarity
• Internal Set Factors: Learning, Motivation &
Personality
 Localization and Organization

• To localize objects, we need to separate them and then

organize them into groups.
• Organizing Information into identifiable patterns to form
a meaningful whole.
• Rules of organization: identified by Gestalt
psychologists.
• Specify how our brains combine and organize individual
pieces or elements into a meaningful perception
• Figure-ground: In organizing stimuli, we tend to
automatically distinguish between a figure and a ground
 Figure Ground

• Perceived objects are separated from their

general background.
• Organization of visual field into objects
(figures) that stand out from the surroundings
(ground)
• What is figural at any one moment depends on
patterns of sensory stimulation and on the
momentary interests of the perceiver.
 Perceptual Organization

• Closure
• in organizing stimuli, we tend to fill in
any missing parts of a figure and see the
figure as complete
 Perceptual Organization
• Proximity
• in organizing stimuli, we group together
objects that are physically close to one
another
 Perceptual Organization
• Similarity
• in organizing stimuli, we group together
elements that appear similar
• Continuity
• in organizing stimuli, we tend to favor
the smooth or continuous paths when
interpreting a series of points or lines
 Recognition-Context
• Recognizing objects requires that the features of an
object are correctly bound together.
• Context provides meaning and value to objects, events,
situation and other people.
• Visual Stimuli, by themselves, do not convey any
meaning.
• Meaning & value perceived only when placed in a certain
context.
• Bottom-up processes are driven solely by the input –
the raw, sensory data. Sensory receptors register
information about the external environment and send it
up to the brain for interpretation.
• Top-down processes are driven by a person’s
knowledge, experience, attention, and expectations. we
begin with some sense of what is happening and apply
that framework to information from the world
 Abstraction

• Exact to abstract:
Only need to know enough detail to carry out
whatever task is requiring you to perceive the
object.
• More efficient to store abstraction than exact
representation in the memory.
• Information retained is only the critical
information.
 Perceptual Constancy

• Size, shape, brightness & color constancy

• Size constancy
• refers to our tendency to perceive objects
as remaining the same size even when
their images on the retina are continually
growing or shrinking
• Shape constancy
• refers to our tendency to perceive and
object as retaining its same shape even
though when we view it from different
angles, its shape is continually changing
its image on the retina
 Perceptual Constancy

• Brightness constancy
• refers to the tendency to perceive
brightness as remaining the same in
changing illumination
• Color constancy
• refers to the tendency to perceive colors
as remaining stable despite differences in
lighting