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Chapter 3: Sensation & Perception

Syllabus:
Sensory processes, Perception, Gestalt Principles, monocular and binocular cues, illusions and
extra sensory perceptions, determinants of perception.
Past papers
1, Explain what takes place in perceptual processes once the info from the situation is received
by the individual. (2001).
2. What are the main determinants of perception? Explain the effects of learning & Motivation
in the formation of perception. (2002)
3. Elucidate determinants of perception (7) lodged within the individual alone. (2003, 2005)
4. Define Perceptual Constancy, explain the influences that allow us to perceive constant size,
shape & brightness. (2004)
5. Define perception and sensation and explain how the five senses specially vision and hearing
operate? (2010)
6. Distinguish between sensation and perception. Explain determinants of perception (2011)
7. Define perception and consciousness. Explain how the types of perceptual constancy operate?
(2012)
8. How do individual and cultural factors influence our perception? Discuss with examples.
(2013)
9. Differentiate between fine sensation and perception. Elaborate Gestalt Principles of
perception. (2017)
10. Differentiate between sensation and perception. Describe different determinants of
perception. (2019)
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What is sensation?
Sensation is defined as the process of the sensory organs transforming physical energy into
neurological impulses the brain interprets as the five senses of vision, smell, taste, touch, and
hearing. This process is known as transduction.
It involves absorption of energy such as light or sound waves, by sensory organs such as the
eyes & ears.
What is Perception?
Perception in psychology can be defined as the sensory experience of the world, which includes
how an individual recognizes and interpreter sensory information. This also includes how one
responds to those stimuli.
It involves organizing & translating sensory input into something meaningful

2, Basic concepts in understanding sensation & Perception:

Psychophysics: The study of how physical stimuli are translated into psychological experience.
Stimulus: Sensation begins with a stimulus, any detectable input from our environment.
Threshold: dividing point B/W energy levels that do and don’t have a detectable effect. For
example gadget with a photo cell. Level of light intensity: threshold.
Absolute Threshold: min stimulus intensity that an org can detect. E.g: Candle in darkness

Our Sense of Sight: The Visual System

Our eyes receive light energy & transduce it into neural messages that our brain then processes
into what we consciously see.
The Stimulus input: Light Energy
Scientifically speaking, what strikes our eyes is not color but pulses of electromagnetic energy
that our Visual system perceives as color. What we see as visible light is but a thin slice of the
whole spectrum of electromagnetic energy. This electromagnetic spectrum ranges from
imperceptibly short waves of gamma rays, to the narrow band we see as visible light, to the long
waves of radio transmission and AC circuits.
How our Sensory Experience is determined:
Two physical characteristics of light help determine our sensory experience of them.
Light's wavelength-the distance from one wave peak to the next-determines its hue (the color
we experience, such as blue or gren).
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Intensity, the amount of energy in light waves (determined by a wave's amplitude, or height),
influences brightness.
To understand how we transform physical energy into color and meaning, we first need to
understand vision's window, the eye.
THE EYE
Light enters the eye through the cornea, which protects the eye and bends light to provide focus.
The light then passes through the pupil, a small adjustable opening surrounded by the iris,
Iris a colored muscle that adjusts light intake. The iris dilates or constricts in response to light
intensity and even to inner emotions. (When we're feeling amorous, our telltale dilated pupils and
dark eyes subtly signal our interest.) Each iris is so distinctive that an iris-scanning machine
could confirm your identity.
Behind the pupil is a lens that focuses incoming light rays into an image on the retina, a
multilayered tissue on the eyeball's sensitive inner surface. The lens focuses the rays by changing
its curvature in a process called accommodation.

The retina doesn't ""see" a whole image. Rather, its millions of receptor cells convert
particles of light energy into neural impulses and forward those to the brain. There the impulses
are reassembled into a perceived, upright-seeming image.
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The Retina
If you could follow a single light energy particle into your eye you would first make your
way through the retina's outer layer of cells to its buried receptor cells, the rods and cones.
There, you would see the light energy trigger chemical changes that would spark neural signals,
activating neighboring bipolar cells. The bipolar cells in turn would activate the neighboring
ganglion cells.
Following the particle's path, you would see axons from this network of ganglion cells
converging, like the strands of a rope, to form the optic nerve that carries information to your
brain (where the thalamus will receive and distribute the information). The optic nerve can send
nearly 1 million messages at once through its nearly 1 million ganglion fibers. (T'he auditory
nerve, which enables hearing, carries much less information through its mere 30,000 fibers.)
Where the optic nerve leaves the eye there are no receptor cells creating a blind spot. Close one
eye and you won't see a black hole on your TV screen, however. Without seeking your approval,
your brain fills in the hole.
Photoreceptors:

Rods Cones

1, They are rod-shaped, light-sensitive cells.
2. They are found on most of the peripheral
parts of the retina.
3. About 120 million of rods are found in the
retina.
4. The vision gained by rods is called
scotopic vision.
5. Since rods are sensitive to the scattered
light, they provide the vision at night.
6. However, rods are not sensitive to colors.
Thereby, they provide a monochromatic
vision.
7. Rhodopsin is the type of visual
pigments present in rods. All the
membrane stacks of the rod cells contain
rhodopsin. Therefore, only one type of
1, Cones are cone shaped cells that aren’t
sensitive to light.
2. They are found in and around Fovea
Centralis. The diameter of the fovea
centralis is 0.3 mm. 
3. About 6 million cones can be identified
in the retina.
3. About 6 million cones can be identified
in the retina.
5. Cones are not very sensitive to light. The
vision of cones is gained under high light
conditions.
6. They are responsible for the color vision
at daylight.
7. Iodopsin. Three types of cone cells can
be identified in the retina with different
color receptions: red, blue, and green.
67% of the cones are red; 32% are green
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rods can be identified in the retina. The and 2% are blue.

light response of the rod cells sharply
peaks at the blue color.

Dark Adaptation:
Dark adaptation refers to how the eye recovers its sensitivity in the dark after exposure
to bright lights. For example: when someone enters a dark theater on a bright day, you stumble
around almost blindly. But within mins you can make your way about in the dim light.
Light Adaptation:
Light adaptation is the adjustment of the eyes when we move from darkness into an area
that is illuminated. For example: when you emerge from a dark theater on a sunny day, you
need to squint to ward off the overwhelming brightness, & the reverse of the dark adaptation
occurs.
Visual Information Processing
After processing by your retina's nearly 130 million receptor rods and cones, information
travels to your bipolar cells, then to your million or so ganglion cells, through their axons making
up the optic nerve, to your brain. Any given retinal area relays its information to a corresponding
location in the visual cortex, in the occipital lobe at the back of your brain.
Feature Detection:
Neurons in the occipital’s lobes visual cortex receive info from individual ganglion cells
in the retina. These feature detector cells derive their name from their ability to respond to a
scene’s specific features to particular edges, lines, angles and movements.
Feature detectors in the visual cortex pass such information to other cortical areas where
teams of cells (super cell clusters) respond to more complex patterns. One temporal lobe area
just behind your right ear, for example, enables you to perceive faces. If this region were
damaged, you might recognize other forms and objects, but not familiar faces. Functional MRI
(fMRI) scans show other brain areas lighting up when people view other object categories.
Damage in these areas blocks other perceptions while sparing face recognition.
Parallel Processing:
Unlike most computers, which do step by step serial processing, our brain engages in
parallel processing: doing many things at once. The brain divides a visual scene into sub
dimensions, such as color, movement, form & depth and works on each aspect simultaneously.
We then construct our perceptions by integrating the separate but parallel work of these
different visual teams.
Recognition:
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To recognize a face, for example, the brain integrates info that the retina projects to
several visual cortex areas, compares it to stored info, & enables you to recognize the image, as,
say, your grandmother. If researchers temporarily disrupt the brain’s face processing areas with
magnetic pulses, people are unable to recognize faces.

Color Vision & Color Blindness

Although the range of wavelengths to which humans are sensitive is relatively narrow, at
least in comparison with the entire electromagnetic spectrum, the portion to which we are
capable of responding allows us great flexibility in sensing the world. Nowhere is this clearer
than in terms of the no. of colors we can discern. A person with normal color vision is capable of
distinguishing no less than 7M different colors.
Color Blindness:
Approx. 7% of men & 4% of women are colorblind. For most people with color
blindness, the world looks quite dull. Red fire engines appear yellow, green grass seems yellow,
& the 3 colors of a traffic light all look yellow. In fact, in the most common form of color
blindness, all red & green objects are seen as yellow.
There are other forms of color blindness as well, but they are quite rare. In yellow-blue
blindness, people are unable to tell the difference b/w yellow & blue & in the most extreme
case an individual perceives no color at all. To such a person the world looks something like the
picture on a black & white TV set.
Explaining Color vision:
To understand why some people are color blind, we need to consider the basics of color
vision. Two processes are involved. The first process is explained by the trichromatic theory of
color vision & the second one by opponent-process theory of color vision.
1 Trichromatic Theory of Color Vision:
(tri means three & Chroma means color). This theory was first stated by Thomas Young
& modified later by Hermann von Helholtz (1852).
“This theory states that the human eye has three types of receptors with differing
sensitivities to diff light wavelengths.”
Explanation: Helmholtz theorized that the eye contains specialized receptors sensitive to the
specific wavelengths associated with red, green & blue. According to this model, people can see
all the colors of the rainbow because the eyes does its own “Color mixing” by varying the ratio
of neural activity among these three types of receptors.
Color blindness encompasses a variety of deficiencies in the ability to distinguish
among colors. Actually, the term color blindness is somewhat misleading, since complete
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blindness to differences in colors is rare. Most people who are color blind are dichromats; i.e,
they make do with only 2 types of color receptors.
2 Opponent Process Theory Of Color Vision:
Ewald Hering proposed this theory in 1878. This theory states that “color perception
depends on receptors that make antagonistic responses to three pairs of colors.”
These three pairs of opponent colors were red versus green, yellow versus blue, and black vs
white. The antagonistic process in this theory provides plausible explanations for complementary
after images & the need for four names (red, green, blue & yellow) to describe colors.
3 Reconciling Theories of Color Vision:
In recent decades, however, it has become clear that it takes both theories to explain color
vision. Eventually a physiological basis for both theories was found. Research that earned
George Wald a Noble Prize demonstrated that the eyes have 3 types of cones, with each type
being most sensitive to a different band of wavelength. The three types of cones represent the
three different color receptors predicted by trichromatic theory.

Our Sense of Hearing: The Auditory System

The Stimulus Input: Soundwaves

Like vision and all the other senses, hearing begins with transduction. Sound waves that are
collected by our ears are converted into neural impulses, which are sent to the brain where they
are integrated with past experience and interpreted as the sounds we experience. We can also feel
the vibrations, & we hear by both air & bone contention.
Amplitude of sound waves determine their loudness. Waves also vary in length therefore in
frequency. Frequency determines the pitch we experience. Long waves have low frequency and
low pitch & vice versa. Sound is measured in decibels. Absolute threshold for hearing is usually
defined as Zero decibels.
Human Hearing Capacity: humans can hear sounds ranging from 20Hz-20,000Hz.
The Ear:
To hear, we must somehow convert sound waves into neural activity.
The human ear accomplishes this feat through an intricate mechanical chain reaction.
First, the visible outer ear channels the sound waves through the auditory canal to the eardrum,
a tight membrane that vibrates with the waves. The middle ear then transmits the eardrum's
vibrations through a piston made of three tiny bones (the hammer, anvil, and stirrup) to the
cochlea, a snail-shaped tube in the inner ear.
The incoming vibrations cause the cochlea's membrane (the oval window) to vibrate,
jostling the fluid that fills the tube. This motion causes ripples in the basilar membrane,
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bending the hair cells lining its surface, not unlike the wind bending a wheat field. Hair cell
movement triggers impulses in the adjacent nerve cells, whose axons converge to form the
auditory nerve, which sends neural messages (via the thalamus) to the temporal lobe's
auditory cortex. From vibrating air to moving piston to fluid waves to electrical impulses to the
brain: Voila! We hear.

Damage to hair cells accounts for most hearing loss. They have been likened to shag
carpet fibers. Walk around on them and they will spring back with a quick vacuuming. But leave
a heavy piece of furniture on them for a long time and they may never rebound. As a general
rule, if we cannot talk over a noise, it is potentially harmful, especially if prolonged and repeated.
Such experiences are common when sound exceeds 100 decibels, as happens in venues from
frenzied sports arenas to bagpipe bands to iPods playing near maximum volume. Ringing of the
ears after exposure to loud machinery or music indicates that we have been bad to our unhappy
hair cells. As pain alerts us to possible bodily harm, ringing of the ears alerts us to possible
hearing damage. It is hearing's equivalent of bleeding.
Auditory Cues:
An auditory cue is a sound signal that represents an incoming sign received through the
ears, causing the brain to hear. The results of receiving and processing these cues are
collectively known as the sense of hearing.
1. Calculating Direction
You automatically turn toward the source of the yell "Watch out!" because your brain
instantly calculates the direction or source. "The brain determines the direction of a sound by
calculating the slight difference in time that it takes sound waves to reach the two ears, which are
about six inches apart."

2. Calculating Pitch
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How do we know whether a sound is the high-frequency, high-pitched chirp of a bird or

the low frequency, low-pitched roar of a truck? Current thinking on how we discriminate pitch
combines two theories.
(i) Place Theory
Hermann von Helmholtz's place theory presumes that “we hear different pitches because
different sound waves trigger activity at different places along the cochlea's basilar membrane.”
Thus, the brain determines a sound's pitch by recognizing the specific place (on the
membrane) that is generating the neural signal. High frequencies produced large vibrations near
the beginning of the cochlea's membrane, low frequencies near the end.
But there is a problem with place theory. It can explain how we hear high-pitched
sounds, but not how we hear low-pitched sounds, because the neural signals generated by low-
pitched sounds are not so neatly localized on the basilar membrane.
(ii) Frequency Theory
Frequency theory suggests an alternative explanation: "The brain reads pitch by
monitoring the frequency of neural impulses travelling up the auditory nerve."
The whole basilar membrane vibrates with the incoming sound wave, triggering neural
impulses to the brain at the same rate as the sound wave. If the sound wave has a frequency of
100 waves per second, then 100 pulses per second travel up the auditory nerve.
Thus, place theory best explains how we sense high pitches, frequency theory best
explains how we sense low pitches, and some combination of place and frequency seems to
handle the pitches in the intermediate range.
(iii) Calculating Loudness
The brain calculates loudness primarily from the frequency or rate of how fast or how
slow nerve impulses arrive from the auditory nerve.
For example, the brain interprets a slower rate of impulses as a softer tone (whisper) and a faster
rate as a louder tone (yell).
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OUR CHEMICAL SENSES: TASTE AND SMELL

TASTE: THE GUSTATORY SYSTEM
The physical stimuli for the sense of taste are chemical substances that are soluble
(dissolvable in water). The gustatory receptors are clusters of taste cells found in the taste buds
that line the trenches around tiny bumps on the tongue.
Process: When these cells absorb chemicals dissolved in saliva, they trigger neural impulses
that are routed through the thalamus to the cortex. Interestingly, taste cells have a short life,
spanning only about ten days, and they are constantly being replaced. New cells are born at the
edge of the taste bud and migrate inward to die at the center.

Primary Tastes
It's generally (but not universally) agreed that there are four primary tastes: sweet, sour,
bitter, and salty. Sensitivity to these tastes is distributed somewhat unevenly across the tongue,
but the variations in sensitivity are quite small and highly complicated. Although taste cells
respond to more than one of the primary tastes, they typically respond best to a specific taste.
Perceptions of taste quality appear to depend on complex patterns of neural activity initiated by
taste receptors.
Some basic taste preferences appear to be innate and to be automatically regulated by
physiological mechanisms. In humans, for instance, newborn infants react positively to Sweet
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tastes and negatively to strong concentrations of bitter, salty, or sour tastes. To some extent,
these innate taste preferences are flexible, changing to accommodate the body's nutritional needs.

SMELL: THE OLFACTORY SYSTEM

In many ways, the sense of smell is much like the sense of taste.
Process: The physical stimuli are chemical substances-volatile ones that can evaporate and be
carried in the air. These chemical stimuli are dissolved in fluid-specifically, the mucus in the
nose.
Structure of Olfactory Receptors:
The receptors for smell are olfactory cilia, hair like structures in the upper portion of the
nasal passages. They resemble taste cells in that they have a short life (30-60 days) and are
constantly being replaced. Olfactory receptors have axons that synapse with cells in the olfactory
bulb and then are routed directly to various areas in the cortex. This arrangement is unique.
Smell is the only sensory system in which incoming information is not routed through the
thalamus before it projects to the cortex.
Classification of odors:
Odors cannot be classified as neatly as tastes, since efforts to identify primary odors
have proven unsatisfactory. If primary odors exist, there must be a fairly large number of them.
Most olfactory receptors respond to a wide range of odors. Thus, the perception of various odors
probably depends on a great many types of receptors that are uniquely responsive to specific
chemical structures. Like the other senses, the sense of smell shows sensory adaptation. The
perceived strength of an odor usually fades to less than half its original strength within about 4
minutes.
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How many odors Human can distinguish:

Humans can distinguish among about 10,000 different odors. However, when people are
asked to identify the sources of specific odors (such as smoke or soap), their performance is
rather mediocre.
For some unknown reason, people have a hard time attaching names to odors. Gender
differences have been found in the ability to identify odors, as females tend to be somewhat
more accurate than males on odor recognition tasks.
OUR SENSE OF TOUCH: SENSORY SYSTEMS IN THE SKIN
The physical stimuli for touch are mechanical, thermal, and chemical energy that
impinge on the skin. These stimuli can produce perceptions of tactile stimulation (the pressure
of touch against the skin), warmth, cold, and pain. The human skin is saturated with at least six
types of sensory receptors.
To some degree, these different types of receptors are specialized for different functions, such as
the registration of pressure, heat, cold, and so forth. However, these distinctions are not as clear
as researchers had originally expected.
Feeling Pressure
Cells in the nervous system that respond to touch are sensitive to specific patches of skin.
These skin patches, which vary considerably in size, are the functional equivalents of receptive
fields in vision. Like visual receptive fields, they often involve a center-surround arrangement.
Thus, stimuli falling in the center produce the opposite effect of stimuli falling in the surrounding
area. If a stimulus is applied continuously to a specific spot on the skin, the perception of
pressure gradually fades. Hence, sensory adaptation occurs in the perception of touch, as it does
in other sensory systems.
The nerve fibers that carry incoming information about tactile stimulation are routed
through the spinal cord to the brainstem. There, the fibers from each side of the body cross over
mostly to the opposite side of the brain. The tactile pathway then projects through the thalamus
and onto the somatosensory cortex in the brain's parietal lobe. Some cells in the somatosensory
cortex function like the feature detectors discovered in vision. They respond to specific features
of touch, such as a movement across the skin in a particular direction.
Feeling Pain
As unpleasant as it is, the sensation of pain is crucial to survival. Pain is a marvelous
warning system. It tells people when they should stop shoveling snow or remove their hand
from a hot oven. Although a life without pain may sound appealing, people born with a rare,
congenital insensitivity to pain would testify otherwise, as they routinely harm themselves.
Pathways to the Brain
The receptors for pain are mostly free nerve endings in the skin. Pain messages are
transmitted to the brain via two types of pathways that pass through different areas in the
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thalamus.
1. One is a fast pathway that registers localized pain and relays it to the cortex in a
fraction of a second. This is the system that hits you with sharp pain when you first
cut your finger.
2. The second system uses a slow pathway that lags a second or two behind the fast
system.
This pathway (which also carries information about temperature) conveys the less
localized, longer-lasting, aching or burning pain that comes after the initial injury. The slow
pathway depends on thin, unmyelinated neurons called C fibers, whereas the fast pathway is
mediated by thicker, myelinated neurons called A-delta fibers. Pain signals may be sent to many
areas in the cortex, as well as to subcortical centers associated with emotion (such as the
hypothalamus and amygdala), depending in part on the nature of the pain.
Gate-Control Theory
Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall (1965) devised the gate-control theory of pain.
"Gate-control theory holds that incoming pain sensations must pass through a "gate in the spinal
cord that can be closed, thus blocking ascending pain signals."
The gate in this model is not an anatomical structure but a pattern of neural activity that
inhibits incoming pain signals. Melzack and Wall suggested that this imaginary gate can be
closed by signals from peripheral receptors or by signals from the brain. They theorized that the
latter mechanism can help explain how factors such as shifts in attention can shut off pain
signals.