Sensation and Perception1. Define sensation and perception.Sensation is the detection of something physical by our sense organs, while perception is the brain’s interpretation of that raw sensory data that your sense organs detected.2. Explain how sensations are made into perceptions.Sensations are turned into perceptions via transduction, the process of your nervous system converting sensory information into electrical signals in your neurons. This allows the information to travel in and around your brain. Once your brain receives the data, our brains try to organize the sensory data into something meaningful. For example, you see the color red and recognize it because of transduction.We notice sensations a lot more when we first experience them, but after a while our brains adapt to the sensation and learn to ignore it—this is so we can conserve energy and focus on more important sensory information.3. Describe the influence of perceptual sets and perceptual hypotheses on our perception.Perceptual sets occur when our expectations influence our perceptions. For example, we might know someone is very intelligent and even though they can have a very normal, average-intelligence conversation, we may perceive that conversation as highly intellectual just because we expect that. Perceptual constancy allows us to perceive stimuli consistently across conditions. When someone is walking towards us from 200 feet away, we don’t imagine that person as extremely small and somehow magically growing as they get closer to us. We know that our perception sees them as small.I also want to mention parallel processing. This is basically multitasking and allows us to perceive multiple stimuli at once. There is bottom up processing, which is constructing a whole image from parts (kind of like a puzzle) and there is top down processing, which occurs when we impose our beliefs and expectations on the stimuli we perceive.Refer to this example for top-down. You may see the following picture as a rat or an old man; it depends on your beliefs and expectations.4. Explain the role of attention in perception.Selective attention is the process of selecting one sensory channel and minimizing others. This happens when you’re at a party, chatting with someone, and you tune out the rest of the party so you can focuson the person speaking to you. This affects our perception because we may miss other stimuli around us.Inattentional blindness occurs when we fail to detect stimuli that are in plain sight when our attention is focused elsewhere. The best example of this is texting and driving. Because you are looking at your phone, you may miss the dog, person, or even vehicle passing in front of you, or you might miss the stopsign. There is also a phenomenon called subliminal messaging. This used to be an advertising technique in movie theaters, where the theater would quickly flash images of popcorn and soda, maybe some nachoson the screen. The images flashed so quickly that your brain could register the perception, but you could not remember the sensation. This would sometimes cause people to want more popcorn or soda and boost the sales for the movie theater.5. Explain the perception of motion.The brain compares visual frames of what is and what was in order to perceive motion. In reality, our brains are playing movies very quickly in our heads to help us perceive motion. The Phi phenomenon gives us the illusion of movement, like when lights on a kiosk rotate around the frame.6. Explain the perception of color.The trichromatic theory proposes that color vision is based on our sensitivity to three primary colors: blue, green, and red. This would help to explain colorblindness. However, this theory was opposed when color blind people would see the opposite of those colors and, after staring a while, would see the color itself. This led to the opponent process theory, which states that we see color vision as a function of complementary, opposing colors. This occurs because cells processing one color (like red) are inhibited by processing another color (like green).7. Distinguish between the three different body senses.The somatosensory system responds to stimuli that are applied to the skin, temperature, and injury. Wesense these things with mechanoreceptors (respond to light touch and deep pressure) and free nerve endings (respond to touch, temperature, and pain). Pain, while annoying, is an important survival sense that helps us learn about our environments. Proprioception is the sense of body position. It helps us keep track of where we are and helps us move efficiently. There are two kinds of proprioception: muscle stretch receptors and tendon force detectors.The vestibular sense is our sense of equilibrium and balance. It allows us to sense and maintain balance as we move around; this is because of the fluid-filled semicircular canals in the inner ear. Our awarenessof this sense is pretty limited, unless we are thrown off balance. Sometimes people with ear infections feel rather off balance, and this is because of balance being maintained by the inner ear.8. Distinguish between pain perception and touch perception.Touch perception travels more quickly than pain perception. For example, when we place our hand on ahot stove, we register the feeling of the stove just before we register the temperature of the stove. 9. Describe human factors.Human factors, or ergonomics, is using our understanding of sensation and perception to create more human-friendly things that make our daily lives easier. For example, by understanding how we use computers at office jobs, we can make keyboards and mouses that let us use our sensations and perceptions more efficiently. The purpose of human factors is to increase productive and minimize
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