PSY151 A

Sensation & Dr. Ark Verma

Perception
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as
we are .”

–Anais Nin
 Sensation

❖ What is your window to the world?

❖ Senses (Vision, Audition, Hearing, Touch, Taste & Smell).
❖ What is the first step?
❖ sensation - awareness resulting from the stimulation of a
sense organ.
❖ What is the second step?
❖ perception - organisation & interpretation of sensations.
 Why study S & P?

❖ The study of sensation & perception is important to us as the knowledge

developed by psychologists is used in many ways for people from different
walks of life:
❖ mechanical & electrical engineers
❖ doctors who deal with visual/hearing/etc. problems
❖ military personnel etc.
❖ the research helps to prepare these people better & understand the
processes involved in a variety of activities:
❖ driving cars, flying planes, designing camouflages, creating & managing
pain etc.
❖ One of the basic processes in sensation is :
❖ transduction - the conversion of stimuli detected by receptor
cells to electrical impulses that are then transported to the
brain in different but related ways.
 Beginning Sensation…

❖ There are a variety of ways in which our sensory systems interact with
the surrounding world:
❖ eyes: light
❖ ears: sound waves
❖ skin: touch, pressure, hot & cold
❖ tongue: taste of food
❖ nose: scents in the air.
❖ The human perceptual system is wired for accuracy & people are
exceedingly good at making use of the information available to them.
❖ Some fun facts:
❖ the human eye can see single candle flame burning 30 miles away &
can distinguish among more then 300,000 colours.
❖ the human ear can detect sounds as low as 20 Hz & as high as 20,000
Hz & can hear the tick of a clock upto 20 feet away in a quiet room.
❖ we can taste a teaspoon of sugar dissolved in around 2 gallons of
water &
❖ we can smell a drop of perfume diffused in a three - room
apartment.
❖ finally, we can feel the wing of a bee dropped on our cheek dropped
from 1 cm above (Galanter, 1962).
 Measuring Sensation

❖ Psychophysics is the branch of

psychology that studies the
effects physical stimuli on
sensory perceptions & mental
states.
❖ German psychologist Gustave
Fechner (1801 - 1887) started
the systematic study of the
relation between the strength
of a stimulus & our ability to
detect the stimulus.
❖ One of the important abilities he pointed out was the ability to
detect faint stimuli.
❖ absolute threshold of a sensation is defined as the intensity of
the stimulus that allows an organism to detect it.
❖ How to determine?
❖ In a typical psychophysics experiment, an individual is
presented with a series of trials in which a signal is
sometimes presented & sometimes not, or in which two
stimuli are presented that are either the same or different.
❖ the participant’s task is to indicate either “yes” if he/she can
detect a sound or not.
❖ the intensity of the stimuli is varied from very faint to just
detectable.
❖ the problem that arises with such kind of stimuli presentation is
uncertainty, i.e. as the senses (in this case our ear) constantly keeps
sending background information to the brain, it is sometimes
difficult to judge whether a sound was there or not.
❖ the responses that one gives are can be analysed using signal
detection analysis.
❖ Signal detection analysis is a technique used to determine the ability
of the perceiver to separate true signals from background noise
(Macmillan & Creelman, 2005).
❖ A hit occurs when the listener correctly identifies the presence of
the sound & a false alarm when the listener incorrectly identifies to
no sound.
❖ The analysis of the data from a psychophysics experiment
creates two measures:
❖ sensitivity refers to the true ability of the individual to detect
the presence of absence of signals.
❖ response bias refers to a behavioural tendency to respond
“yes” to the trials, which is independent of sensitivity.
❖ example:
❖ suppose if you are an army soldier on guard duty, & the job
is to detect the very faint sound of the breaking of branch
that would detect that an enemy is nearby.
❖ in such a high risk proposition, making a false alarm can
alert other soldiers might not be as costly as not being able to
report a sound (a miss), which could be deadly.
❖ this might make one adopt a lenient response strategy where
in you would raise an alarm as soon as you suspect a signal,
coz other side could be costly.
❖ In another scenario, when medical technicians study body
images for the presence of cancerous tumors.
❖ Again, a miss can be very costly, but false alarms also have
costs.
❖ The ultimate decisions that the technicians make are based on
the quality of the signal (clarity of the image), their experience
and training (the ability to recognise certain shapes and
textures of tutors), and their best guesses about the relative
costs of misses versus false alarms.
❖ Another important criterion is the ability to differentiate
between two stimuli.
❖ the difference threshold refers to the change in a stimulus that
can just barely be detected by the organism.
❖ The German physiologist Ernst Weber (1795 - 1878) made an
important discovery regarding the JND - the just noticeable
difference of a stimulus is a constant proportion of the original
intensity of the stimulus. e.g. if you add 1 teaspoon of sugar to
milk that has no sugar already versus adding 1 teaspoon of
sugar to milk that has already has 10 spoons of sugar added.
❖ a caveat of this could be seen in our shopping behaviour. Our
tendency to perceive cost differences between products is
dependent not only on the amount of money we will spend or
save, but also on the amount of money saved relative to the
price of the purchase. e.g. what would you prefer 1 rupee or a 3
rupee product or as compared to if you are asked to make a
choice between a 397 versus 399 rupee product.
❖ A word on the subliminal stimuli:
❖ In one experiment, Karremans, Strobe & Claus (2006) had
Dutch college students view a series of computer trials in
which as string of letters such as BBBBBBBB or BBBBbBBB were
presented on the screen.
❖ To be sure that they paid attention to the display, the students
were asked to note whether the strings contained a small letter.
❖ However immediately before each of the letter strings , the
researchers presented either the name of a drink that is popular
in the Netherlands (Lipton Ice) or a control string containing
the same letters as the name (Npeic Tol) for around 20 ms.
❖ The students were later asked to indicate their attention to
drink Lipton Ice, by answering questions such as “ If you
would sit on a terrace now, how likely it is that you would
order Lipton Ice.” and also to indicate how thirsty they were at
the time.
❖ The researchers found that the students who had been exposed
to the “Lipton Ice” words were significantly more likely to say
that they would order Lipton Ice than were these who had been
exposed to control string.
❖ Due to its high potency in influencing people without their
knowledge, subliminal advertising has been legally banned n
many countries, including Australia, UK & the USA.
❖ But, the effect of subliminal advertising is still not certain; as
Trappey (1996) conducted a meta - analysis of over 23 studies
that tested the influence of subliminal advertising on consumer
choice and found that subliminal advertising had a negligible
effect on consumer choice.
❖ Several other indirect advertising technique have been used to
influence consumer choice.
❖ e.g. several products as automobiles, beverages (Cold
Drinks, & alcoholic beverages) are subtly associated with
sexually arousing images.
❖ “product placement” techniques wherein the images of
brands (Cars, Sodas, electronics etc.) are placed on websites
and television shows, movies etc for gaining more & more
eyeballs.
❖ blindsight - a condition in which people are unable to
consciously report on visual stimuli but nevertheless are able to
accurately answer questions about what they are seeing. for e.g.
people with blindsight are able to correctly determine an
object’s location & direction of movement as well as identify
simple geometrical forms and patterns (Weiskrantz, 1997).
 Seeing: Vision

❖ Humans for a large part rely on vision, consequently a large

part of our cerebral cortex is devoted to seeing, & we have
highly developed visual skills.
❖ In a nutshell, seeing begins a when a ray of light falls on the
eyes, initiating the process of transduction.
❖ this visual information then reaches the cortex & is processed
by a variety of neurons that detect colours, shapes & motion &
create meaningful perceptions out of the incoming stimuli.
❖ the Human eye can detect electromagnetic waves from about
400 to 700 nm in wavelength, this is known as the visible
spectrum.
 Sensing Eye & Perceiving Visual Cortex

❖ As you can see, in the anatomy of the human eye, that light enters
through the
❖ cornea, a clear covering that protects the eye and begins to
focus the incoming light.
❖ the light then pass through the
❖ pupil, a small opening in the centre of the eye. the pupil is
surrounded by the
❖ iris, the coloured part of the eye that controls the size of the
pupil by constricting or dilating in response to light intensity.
❖ Behind the pupil is the
❖ lens, a structure that focuses the incoming light on the retina, the
layer of tissue at the back of the eye that contains photoreceptor cells.
❖ As our eyes move from near objects to distant objects, a process known
as visual accommodation occurs, i.e. the process of changing the curvature
of the lease to keep the light entering the eye focused on the retina.
❖ rays from the top of an image strike the bottom of the retina & vice -
versa, and rays, from the left side of the image strike the right part of
retina & vice - versa, causing the image to be upside down &
backward.
❖ also, the image projected on the retina is flat, & yet our final
perception of the image is three - dimensional.
❖ the retina contains layers of neurons specialised to respond to
light.
❖ as light falls on the retina, it first activates receptor cells
known as rods and cones.
❖ the activation of these cells then spread to the bipolar cells and
then to the ganglion cells, which other & converge, like
strands of a rope, forming the optic nerve.
❖ the optic nerve is a collection of millions of ganglion neurons
that sends vast amount of visual information, via the
thalamus, to the brain.
❖ Rods are visual neurons that specialise in detecting black, white
& grey colours.
❖ there are 120 million rods in each eye. rods do not provide a
lot of detail about the images we see, but they are highly
sensitive to shorter - waved (darker) and weak light, they
help us see in dim light, for e.g. at night.
❖ also, the rods are located primarily around the edges of the
retina, they are particularly active in peripheral vision.
❖ Cones, are visual neurons that are specialised in detecting fine
detail & colours.
❖ there are around 5 million cones in each eye that enable us to
see in colour, but they operate best in bright light.
❖ the cones are located primarily in and around the fovea,
which is the central point of the retina.
❖ the sensory information received by the retina is relayed
through the thalamus to corresponding areas in the visual
cortex, i.e. the occipital lobe at the back of the brain.
❖ the left and right eyes send information to both the left & the
right hemispheres and the visual cortex processes each of the
cues separately, & in parallel.
❖ this is an adaptational advantage to an organism that loses
sight in one eye, because even if only one eye is functional, both
hemispheres will still receive input.
❖ Th visual cortex is made up of specialised neurons that turn the
sensations they receive from the optic nerve to meaningful
images.
❖ because there are no photoreceptor cells at the place where the
optic nerve leaves the retina, a hole or blindspot in our vision is
created.
❖ When both of our eyes are open, we don't experience a
problem, because our eyes are moving constantly & make up
what the other eye misses; however even if one eye is open the
visual system fills in the small hole in our vision with similar
patterns from the surrounding areas, & we don’t notice the
difference.
 Moving to perception

❖ Perception is created in part through the simultaneous action of

thousands of feature detector neurons - specialised neurons,
located in the visual cortex, that respond to the strength, angles,
shapes, edges, & movements of a visual stimulus (Kelsey, 1997).
❖ the feature detectors work in parallel, each performing a
separate function.
❖ e.g. when faced with a red square; the parallel line feature
detectors, the horizontal line feature detectors, & the red
colour feature detectors all become activated.
❖ this activation is then passed on to other parts of the visual cortex here
other neurons compare the information supplied bu the feature
detectors with images stored in memory.
❖ suddenly, in a flash of recognition, the many neurons fire together,
creating the single image of the red square that we experience
(Rodriguez, et al., 1999).
❖ some feature detectors are tuned to selectively respond to particularly
important objects, for instance, faces, smiles & body parts etc.
❖ When researchers disrupted face recognition areas of the cortex
using TMS, people were temporarily unable to recognise faces &
yet they were able to recognise houses (McKone, Kanwiyher &
Duchaine, 2007).
❖ Perceiving Colour: the human visual system can detect &
discriminate among 7 million colour variations (Geldard, 1972);
though these are created by combinations of three primary
colours: red, green & blue.
❖ Helmholtz (1821 - 1894) theorised that colour is perceived because the
cones in the retina come in three types.
❖ one type pf cone primarily reacts to blue lights (i.e. shorter
wavelengths), another reacts to green light (i.e. medium wavelengths)
& a third reacts primarily to red light (Li.e. long wavelengths).
❖ the visual cortex detects & compares the strengths of the signals from
each of the three type of cones, creating the experience of colour.
❖ Acc. to this Young - Helmholtz trichromatic colour theory, what colour we
see depends on the mix of signals from the three types of cones.
❖ if the brain is receiving primarily blue & red signals, it will perceive
purple; if it receives messages from all three types of cones, it sees
white.
❖ the different functions of the three types of cones are apparent
in people who experience colour blindness - the inability to
detect either green and or red colours.
❖ about 1 in 50 (mostly men), lack functioning in the red - or
green sensitive cones leaving them only able to experience
either or two colours.
❖ the trichromatic colour theory cannon explain all of ham vision.
for e.g. although the colour purple does appear to us as a
mixing of red & blue, yellow does not appear to be a mix of red
& green. even colour blind people can see yellow.
❖ An alternative approach is the opponent process colour theory,
which proposes that we analyse sensory information not in
terms of three colours but rather in sets of “opponent colours”:
red - green; yellow - blue & white - black”.
❖ evidence for this comes from the fact that some neurons in the
retina & in the visual cortex are excited by one colour (e.g. red)
& inhabited by another colour (e.g. green).
❖ the trichromatic & the opponent process mechanisms work
together to produce colour vision. When light enters the eye,
the red, blue & green cones on the retina respond in different
degrees & send different strength signals of red, blue & green
through the optic nerve.
❖ the colour signals are then processed both by ganglion cels and
by the neurons in the visual cortex (Gegenfurtner & Kiper,
2003).
❖ Perceiving Form
❖ perception of form is an important human capacity.
❖ German psychologists in the 1930’s & 1940’s namely, Kurt
Kofka (1886 - 1941) & Wolfgang Kohler (1887 - 1967), argued
that we create forms out of their component sensations based
on the idea of the gestalt, a meaningfully organised whole.
❖ i.e. the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Figure and Ground
Similarity
Proximity
Continuity
Closure
❖ Perceiving Depth
❖ Depth perception refers to the ability to perceive three -
dimensional space and to accurately judge distance.
❖ without depth perception we won’t be able to do a variety of
visual activities, e.g. drive a car, thread a needle or simply
navigate our way around a supermarket etc.
❖ depth perception is in part based on innate capacities and in
part learned through experience (Witherington, 2005).
❖ Eleanor Gibson & Richard Walk (1960) tested the ability to perceive depth in 6
to 14 month old infants by placing them on a visual cliff, a mechanism that gives
the perception of a dangerous drop off, in which infants can be safely tested for their
perception of depth.
❖ the infants were placed on one side of the cliff, while their mothers called to
them from the other side. Gibson & Walk found that most infants either
crawled away from the cliff or remained on board and cried because they
wanted to go their mothers, but they perceived a chasm that they instinctively
could not cross.
❖ studies have also found that even very young children who cannot crawl
are fearful of height (Campos, Langer & Krowitz, 1970).
❖ also, studies have found that infants improve their hand - eye coordination
as they learn to better grasp objects and as they gain more experience in
crawling, indicating that depth perception is also learned (Adolph, 200).
❖ Depth perception is the result of our use of depth cues, messages from our bodies
and the external environment that supply us with information about space & distance.
❖ binocular depth cues are depth cues that are created by retinal image
disparity - i.e. the space between our eyes , & thus which require the
coordination of both eyes.
❖ an outcome of retinal disparity is that the images projected on each eye
are slightly different from each other.
❖ the visual cortex automatically merges the two images into one, enabling
us to perceive depth.
❖ your 3 - D movies makes use of retinal disparity by using 3 - D glasses
that the viewer wears to create a different image on each eye. the
perceptual system quickly, easily & unconsciously turns the disparity
into 3 - D.
❖ another important binocular depth cue is convergence, the
inward turning of our eyes that is required to focus on objects
that are less than about 50 feet away from us. the visual cortex
uses the size of the convergence angle between the eyes to
judge the object’s distance.
❖ e.g. you will your eyes converging if you try to bring a pencil
or a finger closer to you nose, while continuing to focus on it.
this won’t work if one eye is closed.
❖ the visual system also uses accommodation to help determine
depth. As the lens changes its curvature to focus on distant or
close objects, information relayed from the muscles attached to
the lens help us determine an object’s distance.
❖ Accommodation is only effective at short viewing distances &
comes handy in tasks for e.g. when threading a needle.
❖ Besides, there are also depth res that are monocular, i.e.
requiring only one eye to work, i.e. monocular cues.
❖ Perceiving Motion
❖ many animals as well as humans, have very sophisticated
perceptual skills that allow them to coordinate their own
motion with the motion of moving objects in order to create
a collision with that object.
❖ bats & birds use this mechanism to catch up with their
prey, dogs use it catch a frisbee & humans to catch a
football or cricket ball etc.
❖ the brain detects motion partly from the changing size of an image
on the retina (i.e. objects that look bigger are usually closer to us)
& in part from the relative brightness of objects.
❖ we also experience motion when objects near each other change
their appearance.
❖ the beta effect refers to the perception of motion that occurs
when different images are presented next to each other in
succession.
❖ the visual cortex fills in the missing part of the motion & we see
the object as moving.
❖ the beta effect is used in movies to create the experience of motion.
❖ another related effect is the phi phenomenon, in which we
perceive a sensation of motion caused by the appearance and
disappearance of objects that are near each other.
❖ the phi phenomenon looks like a moving zone or cloud of
background colour surrounding the flashing objects.
❖ the beta effect & the phi phenomenon are other examples of the
gestalt, i.e. the tendency to “see more than the sum of the
parts.”
 HEARING

❖ Hearing, too begins with transduction.

❖ sound waves are collected by our ears and converted into
neural impulses, which are sent to the brain where they are
integrated with past experience and interpreted as the
sounds we experience.
❖ the human ear is sensitive to a wide range of sounds, ranging
from the faint click of a clock to the roar of a rock band.
❖ but the human ear is particularly sensitive to the sounds in the
same frequency range as the human voice.
❖ the Ear: the ear detects sound waves.
❖ vibrating objects (such as the human vocal chords or guitar
strings) cause air molecules to bump into each other and
produce sound waves, which travel from they source as
peaks and valleys much like the ripples that expand outward
when a stone is tossed into a pond.
❖ sound waves are carried within medium such as air, water or
metal, & it is the changes in pressure associated with these
mediums that the ear detects.
❖ we detect both the wavelength & the amplitude of sound waves.
❖ the wavelength of the sound wave (known as frequency) is
measured in terms of the number of waves that arrive per
second and determines our perception of pitch, i.e. the
perceived frequency of the sound.
❖ longer sound waves have lower frequency & produce a lower
pitch whereas shorter sound waves have higher frequency &
higher pitch.
❖ the amplitude, or height of the sound wave, determines how much
energy it contains and is perceived as loudness (the degree of sound
volume).
❖ larger waves are perceived as louder.
❖ loudness is measured using the unit of relative loudness known as
decibel.
❖ zero decibels represent the absolute threshold for human hearing,
below which we cannot hear a sound. each increase in 10 decibels
represents a ten - fold increase in the loudness of the sound.
❖ the sound of a typical conversation (about 60 decibels) is 1,000
times louder that the sound of a whisper (30 decibels).
❖ the structure of the Ear: audition begins in the pinna, the
external & visible part of the ear, which is shaped like na funnel
to draw in sound waves & guide them into a auditory canal,
❖ at the end of the canal, the sound waves strike the tightly
stretched, highly sensitive membrane known as the tympanic
membrane (or eardrum), which vibrates with the waves.
❖ the resulting vibrations are relayed into the middle ear through
three tiny bones, known as the ossicles - the hammer (malleus),
the anvil (incus) and stirrup (stapes) - to the cochlea, a sail
shaped liquid filled tube in the inner ear.
❖ the vibrations cause the oval window, the membrane covering the
opening of the cochlea, to vibrate, disturbing the fluid inside the
cochlea.
❖ the movements of the fluid in the cochlea bend the hair cells of the
inner ear. the movement of the hair cells trigger nerve impulses in
the attached neurons, which are sent to the auditory nerve and
then to the auditory cortex in the brain.
❖ the cochlea contains about 16,000 hair cells, each of which hold a
bundle of fibres known as cilia on its tip.
❖ the cilia are so sensitive that they can detect a movement that
pushes them the width of a single atom or shifting the Eiffel Tower
by half an inch (Corey et al., 2004).
❖ the loudness of the sound is directly determined by the number of hair
cells that are vibrating; but
❖ two different mechanisms are used to detect pitch.
❖ the frequency theory of hearing proposes that whatever the pitch of a
sound wave, nerve impulses of a corresponding frequency will be sent to the
auditory nerve. for e.g. a tone measuring 600 Hz will be transducer
into 600 nerve impulses a second.
❖ but for high pitched sounds this theory can’t explain, because
neurons won’t be able to fire fast enough for higher frequencies.
❖ a solution could be that to reach the necessary speed, the neurons
work together in a sort of volley system in which different neurons
fire in sequence, allowing us to detect sounds up to 4000 Hz.
❖ the cochlea relays information about the specific area, or place,
in the cochlea that is most activated by the incoming sound.
❖ the place theory of hearing proposes that different areas of the
cochlea respond to different frequencies.
❖ higher tones excite areas closest to the opening of the cochlea
(near the oval window). whereas lower tones excite areas
near the narrow tip of the cochlea, at the opposite end.
❖ pitch is therefore determined in part by the area of the cochlea
firing the most frequently.
❖ that the ears are placed on either side of the head enables us to benefit
from stereophonic, or three dimensional hearing.
❖ if a sound occurs on your left side, the left ear will receive the
sound slightly sooner than the right ear and the sound will receive
will be more intense, allowing you to quickly determine the
location of the sound.
❖ although the distance between the two ears is barely 6 inches &
sound waves travel at 750 miles an hour; the time & intensity
differences are easily detected (Middlebrooks & Green, 1991).
❖ when a sound is equidistant from both ears (such as when it is
directly in front or back, beneath or overhead; we have more
difficulty pinpointing its exact location & we may manoeuvre to
facilitate localisation.
❖ Hearing Loss:
❖ Conductive hearing loss: is caused by physical damage to the ear
(such as to the eardrums or the ossicles) that reduce the ability
of the ear to transfer vibrations from the outer ear to the inner
ear.
❖ Sensorineural hearing loss: is caused by the damage to the cilia or
to the auditory nerve, is less common, but occurs frequently
with increasing age.
❖ the cilia are extremely fragile & by the time we are 65 ears
old; we will have lost 40% of them; particularly those that
respond to high - pitch sounds (Chisolm, Willow & Lister,
2003).
❖ Prolonged exposure to loud sound will eventually create
sensorineural hearing loss as the cilia are damaged by the
noise. People who constantly operate noisy machinery without
using appropriate ear protection are at high risk of hearing loss,
as are people who listen to loud music through their
headphones or who engage in noisy hobbies as hunting or
motorcycling.
❖ People who experience tinnitus ( bringing or a buzzing
sensation) after being exposed to loud sounds have very likely
experienced some damage to their cilia.
 Tasting, Smelling & Touching

❖ Taste:
❖ taste is an important sense,as it leads us towards foods that
provide energy & away from foods that could be harmful.
❖ our ability to taste begins at the taste receptors on the tongue.
the tongue detects 6 different taste sensations, known as
sweet, salty, sour, bitter, piquancy (spicy) & umami (savoury).
❖ umami is a meaty taste associated with meats, cheeses, soy,
seaweed, & mushrooms; also with MSG (Ikeda,
1909/2002).
❖ our tongues are covered with taste buds, which are designed to
sense chemicals in the mouth.
❖ most taste buds are locate din the top outer edges of the
tongue; but there are also receptors at the back of the tongue
as well as on the walls of the mouth and at the back of the
throat.
❖ as we chew the food, it dissolves & enters the taste buds,
triggering nerve impulses that are transmitted to the brain
(Northcutt, 2004).
❖ Human tongues are covered with 2,000 to 10,000 taste buds;
and each bud contains between 50 - 100 taste receptor cells.
❖ taste buds are activated very quickly; a salty or sweet taste that
touches a taste bud for even 1/10th of a second will trigger a
neural impulse (Kelling & Halpern, 1983). On, average, taste
buds live for about 5 days after which new taste buds replace
them. As we get older the rate of replacement goes down &
makes us less receptive to taste.
❖ the area of the sensory cortex that responds to taste is in a very
similar location to the area that responds to smell; a fact that
helps explain why the sense of smell also contributes to our
experience to the things we eat.
❖ Smelling
❖ As we breathe in air through our nostrils, we inhale airborne
chemical molecules, which are detected by the 10 - 20 million
receptor cells embedded in the olfactory membrane of the
upper nasal passage.
❖ the olfactory receptor cells are topped with tentacle like
protrusions that contain receptor proteins.
❖ when an odour receptor is stimulated, the membrane
sends neural messages up the olfactory nerve to the brain.
❖ we have approximately 1000 types of door receptor cells (Bensafi et
al., 2004) & it is estimated that we can detect10,000 different odours
(Malnic, Hirono, Sato, & Buck, 1999).
❖ the receptors come in many different shapes & respond selectively
to different smells.
❖ like a “lock” & “key”, different chemicals “fit” into different
receptor cells & odours are detected according to their influence
on a combination of receptor cells. these many combinations are
sent over to & later, decoded by the olfactory cortex.
❖ the sense of smell peaks in early adulthood & slowly declines
with age; diminishing significantly by 60 - 70 years of age.
❖ Touch:
❖ the sense of touch is essential to human developments.
infants thrive when they are cuddled & attended to, but not
if they are deprived of human contact (Baysinger, Plubell &
Harlow, 1973).
❖ touch communicates warmth, caring & support and is an
essential part of the enjoyment we gain form our social
interactions with close others (Field et al., 1997).
❖ the skin, i..e the largest organ in the body is the sensory
organ for touch.
❖ the skin contains a variety of nerve endings, combinations of which
respond to particular types of pressures and temperatures.
❖ the thousand of nerve endings in the skin respond to four basic
sensations: Pressure, hot, cold, & pain; but only the sensation of
pressure has its own specialised receptors. Other sensations are created
by a combination of the other four.
❖ tickle = caused by the stimulation of neighbouring pressure
receptors.
❖ heat: caused by the stimulation of hot & cold receptors.
❖ itching = caused by the repeated stimulation of pain receptors.
❖ wetness: caused by repeated stimulation of cold & pressure receptors
❖ the skin is important not only in providing information about
touch & temperature but also in proprioception - the ability to
sense the position and movement of our body parts.
❖ it is accomplished by specialised neurons located in the skin,
joints, bones, ears & tendons - which send messages about the
compression and the contraction of muscles throughout the
body.
❖ without this feedback from our bones & muscles, we would be
unable to play sports, walk or even stand upright.
❖ the ability to keep track of where the body is moving is also
provided by the vestibular system, a set of liquid filled areas in the
inner ear that monitor the head’s position and movement, maintaining the
body’s balance.
❖ the vestibular system includes the semicircular canals & the
vestibular sacs.
❖ these sacs connect the canals with the cochlea.
❖ the semicircular canals sense the rotational movements of the
body & the vestibular sacs sense linear accelerations.
❖ the vestibular system send signals to the neural structure that
control eye movements & to the muscles that keep the body
upright.
❖ Pain:
❖ the experience of pain is how the body informs us that we are in
danger.
❖ the gate control theory of pain, proposed that pain is determined
by the operation of two types of nerve fibres in the spinal
chord.
❖ one set of smaller nerve fibres carries pain from the body
parts to the brain; whereas the second set of larger fivers is
designed to “stop” or “start” the flow of pain.
❖ It is for this reason that massaging the area will help alleviate
pain - the massage activates the large nerve fibres that block
the pain signals of the smaller nerve fibres.
❖ experiencing pain is a lot more complicated than simply
responding to neural messages; it si also a matte of perception.
❖ we feel pain less, when we are busy focusing on a challenging
activity (Bantick et al., 2002).
❖ pain is soothed by the brain’s release of endorphins, natural
hormonal pain killers.
❖ the release of endorphins can explain the euphoria
experienced in the running of a marathon (Sternberg, et al.,
1998).
 Accuracy & Inaccuracy in Perception

❖ mostly, however, we do not “experience” sensation; we

experience the outcome of perception - the total package that
the brain puts together from the pieces it receives through our
senses & that the brain creates for us to experience.
❖ this meaning making involves the automatic operation of a
variety of essential perceptual processes.
❖ sensory interaction: the working together of different senses to
create experience.
❖ sensory interaction is involved when taste, smell, &
texture combine to create the flavour we experience in
food.
❖ e.g. Mc Gurk Effect
❖ Other examples of sensory interaction include the experience of
nausea that can occur when the sensory information received
from the eyes & the body does not match information from the
vestibular system (Flanagan, May & Debbie, 2004)
❖ synesthesia - an experience in which one sensation (e.g. hearing
a sound) creates experiences in another (e.g. Vision)
❖ Another important perceptual process is selective attention - the ability
to focus on some sensory inputs while tuning out others.
❖ selective attention allows us to focus on a single talker at a party
while ignoring other conversations that are occurring around us
(Broadbent, 1958).
❖ without automatic selective attention, we’d be unable to focus
on the selected conversation which we want to hear.
❖ but selective attention is not complete; we still keep monitoring
other conversations that ar going on & we can even hear if our
name is mentioned in a far corner of the room. this is referred to
as the cocktail party phenomenon & shows us that although
selective attention is limiting what we process; we are doing a
lot of unconscious monitoring of the world around us.
❖ another process is sensory adaptation - a decreased sensitivity to
a stimulus after prolonged & constant exposure. e.g. when you
initially step into swimming pool.
❖ after prolonged exposure to the same stimulus, our sensitivity
towards it diminishes & we no longer perceive it.
❖ this ability to adapt is necessary, as it leaves our sensory
receptors free to detect the important & informative changes in
our environment & respond accordingly.
❖ another important phenomenon is perceptual constantly - the
ability to perceive a stimulus as constant despite changes in
sensation.
❖ perceptual mechanisms take care of the problems of varying
sensations by allowing us to perceive constants in terms of
shapes, colours, brightness etc.
❖ e.g. the visual system corrects for colour constancy. if you are
wearing a blue jeans & white shirt; the experience varies
whether you are indoors & outdoors.
❖ Role of expectations in perception
❖ our emotions, mind - set, expectations& the contexts in
which our sensations occur all have a profound influence on
perception.
❖ people who are warned that they are about to taste
something bad rate what they do taste more negatively
than people who are told that the taste won’t be sod bad
(Nitschke et al., 2006).
❖ people perceive a child & adult pair more alike when they
are told that they are parent & child (Bressan & Dal
Martello, 2002).
❖ Similarly, when participants see images of the same baby they
rate it as stronger and bigger when they are told that it is boy
as compared when they are told that it is a girl.
❖ research participants who learn that a child is from a lower
social background perceive the child’s score on an intelligence
test lower than people see the same test taken by a child they
are told is from a higher upper class background (Darley &
Gross, 1983).
❖ Plassmann et al. (2008) found that wines were rated more
positively & caused greater brain activity in brain areas linked
to pleasure; when they were described as more expensive
compared to when they were described as less expensive.
❖ Our perceptions are also influenced by our desires &
motivations.
❖ when we are hungry, food related words grab our attention
more than non - food related words (Mogg, Bradley, Hyare &
Lee, 1998).
❖ we perceive objects that we can reach as bigger than those
we cannot reach (Witt & Proffitt, 2005).
❖ people who favour a political candidate’s policies view the
candidate’s colour skin more positively than those who
oppose the candidate’s policies (Caruso, Mead & Ballets,
2009).
❖ Even our culture influences perception.
❖ Chu, Boland & Nisbett (2005) showed American & Asian
graduate students such as an airplane, an animal, or a train,
against complex backgrounds and
❖ found that the American students tended to focus more on
the foreground image; while Asian students paid more
attention to the image’s context.
❖ Further, Asian - American students focussed more or less on
the context depending on whether their Asian or American
identity had been activated.