SENSATION AND
PERCEPTION
M M CHIRWA
OUTLINE
• Introduction
• Experiencing sensation
• Vision
• Other senses
• Perceptual process-selection, organisation, interpretation
• The interface between external reality and inner
reality is centred in the sensory system.
• Interpretation of sensory information is through
several complex processes.
• Sensation is the initial contact between
organisms and their physical environment. .
• Sensation, in neurology and psychology is any
concrete, conscious experience resulting from
stimulation of a specific sense organ, sensory
nerve, or sensory area in the brain.
Selected sensory structures
EXPERIENCING SENSATION
• The brain cannot directly detect the physical
forms of energy from the environment such
as light, heat, sound and smells.
• The brain can only respond to intricate
patterns of actions conducted by neurons.
• Neurons receive, move and process sensory
information.
• The study for sensation generally deals with
the relationship between various forms of
sensory stimulation including :
• electromagnetic
• sound waves
• physical pressure and how these inputs are
registered by our sense organs such as:
• the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin.
• Sensation doesn’t automatically occur.
• The sensory receptors in the sense organs
does the encoding.
• The experiencing of sight, sound and smell is
the product of transduction.
• Transduction: the process of physical
properties of stimuli converted into neural
signals and transmitted to our brain by
specialised sensory nerves.
• How much physical stimulation is
necessary to experience a sensation?
• The measuring technique of physical
stimulation is the ability to detect very faint
stimuli.
• Threshold turns out to be impressively low
for most aspects of sensation. E.g.
-hearing a watch tick 20 miles away in a
quiet room,
- On a clear dark night, a dim candle seen thirty miles away.
• Not all stimuli can be detected. For example;
-we smell and taste certain chemicals and
not all.
- sound waves heard only at certain
frequencies
-ability to detect light restricted to a
narrow band of wavelength.
• The absolute threshold refers to the
minimum amount of stimulus energy that
must be present for the stimulus to be
detected 50% of the time.
• Messages that are presented below the
threshold for conscious awareness are
called subliminal messages.
• The range of physical stimuli for human
beings and other species detected seems to be
designed in a way that maximises survival
potential. E.g.
• - human survival is tied to our unique
capacity for spoken language.
• Signal detection theory states that there are
no universal absolute thresholds for
sensations.
• Detection of a stimulus depends on its
physical, energy and on internal factors, such
as the relative costs and benefits associated
with detecting the stimulus.
• Senses operate similarly, but each receives
different information and send to a
specialised region in the brain.
• Each sense activates a different part of the
brain.
• The brain interprets physical energy from the
outside world as nerve signals and processes
them into ways to be used. Signals are
received by senses.
VISION
• The brain receives light waves from photo
receptors such as rods and cones transduced
into neural signals and sent to be interpreted
by the brain.
• We look with our eyes but see with our brain.
• Although there is much that we do sense,
there is even more that we do not. For
example:
-Because birds can see ultraviolet light but humans
cannot, what looks to us like a plain black bird looks
much different to a bird.
• The fact that different organisms have
different sensations is part of their
evolutionary adaptation.
• Each species is adapted to sensing the things
that are most important to them, while being
blissfully unaware of the things that don’t
matter.
OTHER SENSES
• Hearing: allows like vision, to locate objectives in
space sound waves with a certain frequency (pitch)
and amplitude (loudness) processed by the brain in
auditory cortex.
• Our ability to accurately detect stimuli is measured
using a signal detection analysis.
• Signal detection analysis is a technique used to
determine the ability of the perceiver to separate
true signals from background noise.
• In hearing testing, the responses that you give on
the hearing test can be analysed using signal
detection analysis.
• Two of the possible decisions (hits and correct
rejections) are accurate, the other two (misses
and false alarms) are errors. E.g. Dogs, bats,
whales, and some rodents all have much better
hearing than human beings.
• Smell (olfaction) odours interact with receptors in
the nose which transfer a message to the brain in
the auditory cortex.
• Sensation is a physical process, For example,
upon walking into a kitchen and smelling the
scent of baking cinnamon rolls.
• The sensation is the scent receptors detecting the
odour of cinnamon,
SENSATION ON SKIN
• Gestation(taste) soluble substance flavours.
• Skin senses (touch) external contact to touch,
warmth and coldness.
• It is possible to elicit a mach bands on a skin
E.g. in an Interactive Experiment;
• Von Bekesy applied a high pressure at the
other side on part of the skin and gradually
reduced the pressure till it reached a low
pressure value.
• The implications are important that
the skin seems to have lateral
inhibition.
• The existence of lateral inhibition
implies that the skin has receptive
fields.
• The existence of both excitatory and
inhibitory regions play a role in
causing Mach Bands.
• There are also people with disabilities to these
senses, such as blindness and deafness.
• Vestibular senses enable us to keep track of
body parts in relation to each other and have
the ability to feel pain.
• The gate control theory: states that we have a
neural ‘gate’ that is capable of blocking
incoming pain by psychological technics such
as placebo effect.
• All of these sense traduce stimulus energy into
the neural impulses.
REFERENCES
• Baron. R.A (2002). Psychology. Prentice-Hall.
• Macmillan, N. A., & Creelman, C. D.
(2005). Detection theory: A user’s guide (2nd
ed).
• Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates;
Wickens, T. D. (2002). Elementary signal
detection theory. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
