LESSON REVIEW (5 minutes)

PSY 079 (Introduction to Psychology) BS

STUDENT ACTIVITY PSYCHOLOGY / SECOND YEAR Session # 6
SHEET
Materials:

LESSON TITLE: SENSATION AND PERCEPTION PART Textbook, pen and notebook, index card/class list
1 LEARNING OUTCOMES:
Upon successful completion of this lesson, the psychology
student can: Textbook Reference:
Feist, G. J., & Rosenberg, E. L. (2019). Psychology:
1. Explain the basic sensory processes; Perspectives and connections. McGraw Hill Education.
2. Learn the different principles of perception;
3. Discuss how a visual stimulus is sensed and perceived; Plotnik, R., & Kouyoumdjian, H. (2010). Introduction to
and psychology. Cengage Learning.
4. Explain how color, motion, depth, size and shape, and
patterns and wholes are perceived.

As a review of the previous discussion, answer the following questions:

1. Give at least two hormones and provide their functions.
2. What makes the pituitary gland a master gland?
3. What does HPA axis stand for?

MAIN LESSON (60 minutes)

How do you think the outer world become the inner world that we perceive, understand, and make sense out of?
The better that animals can sense what is happening in the world around them, the better they can survive and
reproduce. Yet the apparently simple act of interpreting the sound vibrations hitting your ear as someone’s calling your
name, for example, is a complex involving both the sense organs and the brain. These sense organs transform
information from its physical form (light or sound waves or chemicals) into a nerve impulse and transmit it to the brain,
which organizes in an instant without effort on our part. Think about that for a second: vibrations in your ear become
your friend’s voice; light waves that hit your retina become images of your home. How does sensation become
perception? This interplay between taking in information from the outside world and interpreting it is what sensation and
perception are all about.

Sensation – it is the stimulation of our sense organs by the outer world. Eyes are sensitive to light waves, ears to
sounds, akin to touch and pressure, tongues to tastes, and noses to odors.

Perception – it is the act of organizing and interpreting sensory experience. It is how our psychological world
represents our physical world. We can have different experiences of the real world because individuals can experience
the same physical object in different ways.

See the figure below. The outside world can never be directly sensed, but rather is filtered through our particular
sense organs (sensation) and then interpreted and given meaning in our brain (perception).

BASIC SENSORY PROCESSES

▪ Sensory Adaptation – this is a process wherein our sensitivity diminishes when we have constant stimulation. It
ensures that we notice changes in stimulation more than stimulation itself.

▪ Transduction – it is the conversion of physical into neural information, such as when cells in the retina change
light waves to neural energy, when hair cells in the inner ear change sound waves to neural energy, when
chemicals in

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the air bind to receptors in the nose, when food chemicals stimulate taste buds on the tongue, and when
pressure and temperature stimulate nerve cells in the skin.

PRINCIPLES OF PERCEPTION

Some of the earliest experiments in psychology were in the field of psychophysics, the study of how people
psychologically perceive (psycho-) physical stimuli (“physics”) such as light, sound waves, and touch. Some basic
principles of perception have emerged from over a century of research in this area, including absolute threshold,
signal detection theory, difference threshold, and perceptual set.

Principle 1. Absolute Threshold

o It is the lowest level of a stimulus we can detect half of the time. A common way to present threshold
is for a researcher to present a stimulus, such as light, of different intensities to a research participant.
o People differ in their absolute thresholds with some people being more sensitive than others. o
Absolute thresholds are not constant; they change depending on the cost of making an error,
motivation, and even personality.

Principle 2. Signal Detection Theory

o It attempts to separate “signal” from “noise” and takes into account both stimulus intensity and the
decision-making processes people use in detecting a stimulus.
o In signal detection research, low intensity stimulus is presented on some occasions but not
presented on other occasions (Green & Swets, 1974; Swets, 1964; Wickens, 2002). Instead of
having a 50% detection line which is at threshold, signal detection experiments present only a
single, low-intensity stimulus.
o In signal detection, it is assumed that a person’s absolute threshold fluctuates, sometimes being
more sensitive and other times being less sensitive, depending on the cost of failing to detect the
stimulus.

Principle 3. Difference Threshold

o It is the smallest amount of change between two stimuli that a person can detect half of the time. o
Difference thresholds are relative thresholds and are also referred to a just noticeable differences
(JND) because they involve the smallest difference that is noticeable – and people differ in their JND
sensitivity.

Principle 4. Perceptual Set

o It is the effect of frame of mind on perception. It is also a tendency to perceive stimuli in a certain
manner.
o It makes us more likely to perceive one thing than another and explains the adage “we see what we
want to see and hear what we want to hear.”

VISION

Most mammals rely on smell over all other senses, but humans are predominantly visual creatures. We rely so
much on our sense of sight that we often ignore other types of information. Why is vision so important? In terms of
evolution, being able to see helps us know where we are, what other people think might want from us, and whether
there is danger nearby.
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Sensing Visual Stimuli

The eye bends light convert energy to neural energy and sends that information to the brain for further processing.
The eye is the gateway to vision, but very little of what we experience as vision actually happens in the eye. visual
perception happens in the brain, with input from the eye.

Parts of the Eye

Cornea – a hard covering that protects the lens.

Pupil – the opening in the iris.

Iris – the muscle that form the colored part of the eye.

Lens – the structure that sits behind the pupil.

Retina – a thin layer of nerve tissue that lines the back of

the eye. Contains two photoreceptors: rods for night
vision and cones for color vision or bright light.

Fovea – a spot on the back of the retina which contains

the highest concentration of cones in the retina.

How does light travel to the eye and how does it convert light energy to neural energy?

Light enters the eye at the cornea. It then passes through a liquid until it reaches the pupil. Light enters the interior
of the ye through the pupil. The iris adjusts the pupil to control the amount of light entering. The light then passes
through the lens which bends the light rays. Through a process known as accommodation, muscles around the lens
alter its shape to adjust to viewing objects at different distances and to allow the lens to focus light on the retina.
Finally, the retina will convert light energy into neural energy.

The light that hits the retina travels through several cell layers before processing begins. Note that image hits the
retina upside down. The brain reorients the inverted image, so that our world is right side up. The deepest layer of
cells, where processing of light energy begins, is made up of photoreceptors which have two types: the rods and the
cones which convert light energy into neural impulses.

Visual Acuity – our ability to see clearly, and it is dependent on our cones.

Vision and the Brain

After transduction at the photoreceptor layer, visual information is processed by different layers of the cells in the
retina. One of these layers is made up of the ganglion cells, the axons of which make up the optic nerve. The optic
nerve transmits signals from the eye the brain – to the thalamus specifically, and ultimately, to the visual cortex of the
occipital lobes. This journey is not straightforward. The information from the left visual field is processed in the brain’s
right hemisphere, and the information from the right visual field is processed in the brain’s left hemisphere. The point at
which the optic nerve exits the eye is the blind spot of the retina because this location has no receptor cells and
therefore nothing is seen.

Three Types of Neurons in the Visual Cortex

Simple cells: these cells respond to very specific information, such as a bar of light oriented at a particular
angle. Some simple cells respond to only one angle or orientation, while others respond to other angles of
orientation or to edges, shapes, and sizes of lines.

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Complex cells: these cells receive input from many different simple cells
and are receptive to particular stimuli in different parts of the receptive
field. These cells are sensitive to the movement of an image and respond
if the image appears anywhere in the visual field.

Hypercomplex cells: these are the cells that receive inputs from many
complex cells, so they fire in response to patterns of lines. They are
partially involved in integrating pieces of visual information into whole
parts.

PERCEIVING VISUAL STIMULI

The eye is where we sense visual information and the brain is

where we make sense of it (perceive visual information). But making sense
or perceiving of the neural information from the eye involves many different
acts of perception: color, motion, depth, size, and patterns among others.
Each of these perceptual processes works together to help us recognize
objects in the real world.

Perceiving Color

Humans and other primates are unique when it comes to vision in mammals. Primates – including humans – have
three kinds of cones: those that are sensitive to red, to green, or to blue wavelengths of light (Jacobs & Nathans,
2009). Humans therefore are trichromatic.

Theories of Color Vision

▪ Trichromatic Color Theory – reasoned that all the color we experience must result from a mixing of these
three colors of light (red, green, and blue). Light color mixing occurs inside the eye, in terms of how different
kinds of cones respond to different wavelengths of light. How much each cone is stimulated determines the
color we see. Even though is explains how photoreceptors process colored light, it cannot explain some
aspects of color vision such as afterimages, visual images that remain after removal of stimulus.

▪ Opponent-Processing Theory – cones are linked together in three opposing color pairs: blue/yellow,
red/green, and black/white (Hering, 1878). The members of the color pairs oppose one another, whereby
activation of one member of the pair inhibits activity in the other.

Color blindness: a weakness of deficiency in the perception of certain colors, usually resulting from an inherited
pigment deficiency in the photoreceptors.

Perceiving Motion

Feature detectors play a role in how we perceive movement and form. We perceive movement when an image
moves across the retina. Simple and complex cells respond to either the orientation or the direction of moving images.
Sometimes, these moving images truly reflect movement in the world around us. As we view any scene, at least two
factors contribute to how we perceive movement:

▪ The background against which an object moves: when an object moves across a complex background, it
appears to move faster than when it moves across a simple background. For example, horse running
across a field, with mountains and trees in the background, will seem to move faster than one running
across a wide open plain, simply because the background objects provide references that help us note the
change of position in the horse. The human visual system is quite sensitive to changes in the position of
objects, a sensitivity that appears to decline a bit with age (Bennett et al., 2007).

▪ The size of the object: smaller objects appear to move faster than larger objects, when all else is equal. We
can also be fooled into thinking something is moving when it is not. We refer to this illusion as apparent
motion because our brains interpret images that move across our retinas as movement.
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Perceiving Depth

Depth perception is our ability to see things in three dimensions and to discriminate what is near, from what is far.

▪ Binocular Depth Cues: it relies on input from both eyes. The eyes are separated by a few inches, so the
images from each eye provide slightly different viewpoints.
o Binocular disparity: the difference in retinal images due to the fact that our two eyes are separated
by a few inches and is an important cue in depth perception (Read, 2015).

▪ Monocular Depth Cues: it aids to depth perception that do not require two eyes to be effective. These cues
allow people who are blind in one eye to perceive some depth.
o Linear perspective: involves parallel lines that converge, or come together, the farther away they
are from the viewer. The more the converge, the greater distance we perceive.
o Texture gradient: causes the texture of the surface to appear more tightly packed together as the
surface moves to the background. Changes in this information help us judge depth.
o Atmospheric perspective: it comes from looking across a vast space into the distance in the
outdoors. o Interposition: the partial blocking of objects farther away from the viewer by objects
closer to the viewer, which overlap those farther away.
o Moon illusion: occurs when the moon is closer to the horizon because we see it against other cues
that indicate we are looking off into the distance.

Perceiving Size and Shape

Perceptual constancy is the brain’s ability to preserve perception of objects in spite of changes in retinal image
when an object changes in position or distance from the viewer.

▪ Size constancy: we see things as the same size regardless of the changing size of the image on the retina,
because we know what the size of the object is. For example, your friend who stands 6ft and walking away
from you would not make you think that he is shrinking.
▪ Shape constancy: people know the shapes of common things, just as they know their sizes. The brain uses this
knowledge to change retinal images that make the world very confusing. The brain corrects our perception
based on our previous knowledge.

Perceiving Patterns and Wholes

▪ Similarity: Gestalt law that says we tend to group like objects together in visual
perception. ▪ Continuity: seeing points or lines in such a way that they follow a continuous
path.
▪ Proximity: claims that we tend to group together objects that are near one another.

▪ Law of closure: it occurs when we perceive a whole object in the absence of complete information.

You may also watch the YouTube link below to have an audiovisual learning about how visual perception

works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU3IiqUWGcU
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CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING (20 minutes)
You will answer and rationalize this by yourself. This will be recorded as your quiz. One (1) point will be given to correct
answer and another one (1) point for the correct rationalization. Superimpositions or erasures in you
answer/rationalization is not allowed. You are given 20 minutes for this activity.

Multiple Choice

1. Which of the following would you not consider as part of the principles of perception?
a. Stimulus intensity and decision-making processes are involved in the detection of a
stimulus. b. A candle flame seen at 10 kms on a clear night.
c. Our tendency to perceive stimuli in a certain manner.
d. A musician who failed to perceive a slight change in pitch to tune the instrument.
ANSWER: ________
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2. After leaving the retina, what is the first stop in the brain for processing of visual
information? a. the occipital cortex
b. the parietal lobe
c. the hypothalamus
d. the thalamus
ANSWER: ________
RATIO:________________________________________________________________________________________
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3. When we see a door that is closed, it looks like a rectangle. A door that is partially open looks like a trapezoid. Still
we would not think that the door has suddenly changed shape. This situation is referred to as
a. depth perception.
b. perceptual constancy.
c. similarity.
d. motion perception.
ANSWER: ________
RATIO:________________________________________________________________________________________
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4. Imagine that you are throwing a party in your condo unit when suddenly, the power went out. Everything is
completely dark. Then with a bit of time, you begin to see shapes and forms, although, you cannot really see
colors. Which of the following would best explain this picture?
a. The retina has converted light energy into neural energy.
b. The cones in the retina becomes more active due to low illumination.
c. The rods in the retina becomes responsive since it’s dark.
d. The lens started to bend light rays.
ANSWER: ________
RATIO:________________________________________________________________________________________
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5. One time, you visited a museum with some friends. You are looking at Juan Luna’s spoliarium and uttered: “It really
 depicts the struggle, injustice, and cases of prejudice.” This is an example of
a. visual perception.
b. visual sensation.
c. visual adaptation.
d. transduction.
ANSWER: ________
RATIO:________________________________________________________________________________________
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6. This theory claims that ganglion cells in the retina and cells in the thalamus of the brain respond to pairs of color
whereby activation of one member of the pairs inhibits the activity in the other.
a. Trichromatic color theory
b. Opponent-process theory
c. Binocular disparity
d. Afterimages
ANSWER: ________
RATIO:________________________________________________________________________________________
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7. Monocular depth cues do not require two eyes to be effective thus, allowing people who are blind in one eye to
perceive some death. Which of the following is not included in the many cues derived from the seminal work of
James Gibson in terms of monocular depth cues?
a. Texture gradient
b. Interposition
c. Dichromatic
d. Linear perspective
ANSWER: ________
RATIO:________________________________________________________________________________________
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8. Imagine that you see points or lines in such a way that they follow a never-ending pattern. You do not see it as a
result of a combination with other lines or points. You can say that this is an example of
a. similarity.
b. proximity.
c. continuity.
d. law of closure.
ANSWER: ________
RATIO:________________________________________________________________________________________
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9. This is a process wherein the muscles around the lens alter its shape to adjust to viewing objects at different
distances and to allow the lens to focus light on the retina.
a. Accommodation
b. Dark adaptation
c. Visual stimulation
d. Visual acuity
ANSWER: ________
RATIO:________________________________________________________________________________________
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10. Which of the following converts light energy to nerve energy?

a. Lens
b. Pupil
c. Iris
d. Photoreceptors
ANSWER: ________
RATIO:________________________________________________________________________________________
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RATIONALIZATION ACTIVITY (THIS WILL BE DONE DURING THE FACE TO FACE INTERACTION) The instructor
will now rationalize the answers to the students. You can now ask questions and debate among yourselves. Write the
correct answer and correct/additional ratio in the space provided.

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LESSON WRAP-UP (5 minutes)

You will now mark (encircle) the session you have finished today in the tracker below. This is simply a visual to help
you track how much work you have accomplished and how much work there is left to do.

You are done with the session! Let’s track your progress.

To better gauge your understanding in this discussion, kindly answer the question below with
honesty: 1. In today’s session, what was least clear to you?

(For the next lesson, continue working on module for session #7, Sensation and Perception Part 2)

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