Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.

No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of

McGraw-Hill Education.
 Outline
• Defining Sensation and Perception
• Limits of Sensation: Absolute Thresholds
• Just Noticeable Difference and Weber’s Law
• The Five Senses
• Perception: Interpreting Sensory Messages
• Gestalt Principles of Perception
Sensation: the process of receiving information
from outside world, translating it, and
transmitting it to the brain
Perception: the process of interpreting
information and forming images of the world
Stimulus : refers to any aspect of the outside
world that directly influences our behavior or
conscious experience
Transduction : the translation of energy in the
environment into neural impulse

Energy is transduced into neural impulses in
the sense organs by sensory receptor cells.
SENSATION
Sensory Receptors
– specialized cells that selectively detect and transmit sensory
information to the brain
– cells send signals via distinct neural pathways

Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of 4-5
McGraw-Hill Education.
SENSORY THRESHOLDS

Absolute Threshold
the minimum amount of energy an organism can detect
50% of the time

Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of 4-6
McGraw-Hill Education.
 Just Noticeable Difference and Weber’s
Law
Just Noticeable Difference (jnd): the minimum
change in the intensity of a stimulus that can be
detected 50% of the time
Weber’s Law

Max Weber, a psychophysicist in the early 1800s

the amount of change in the stimulus that is
necessary to produce a jnd depends on the
intensity at which the stimulus is first presented
 Difference Thresholds
– how much stimulus change is necessary for detection?
– Just Noticeable Difference (JND)
• JND increases with stimulus
magnitude

Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of 4-8
McGraw-Hill Education.
 The Five Senses
1. Vision
2. Audition
3. Gustation
4. Olfaction
5. Tactile
 Structure of the Eye

Retina

Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of 4-10
McGraw-Hill Education.
Theories of Color Vision
 Structure of the Ear

Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of 4-12
McGraw-Hill Education.
 The Auditory Pathways of the Brain

Once the hair cells convert sound into neural
impulses, these impulses must be sent to the
brain for further processing. Attached to the
end of the cochlea is the auditory nerve. The
bundled neurons of the auditory nerve gather
the information from the hair cells to relay It
to the brain (Pastorino, & Doyle-Portillo,
2013).
Theories of Pitch Perception
 Gustation (Taste) and Olfaction
(Smell)
Chemical senses : require certain chemicals to
come into direct contact with our sense organs.
1. Gustation: certain chemicals in foods and
other substances must be dissolved in our
saliva and come into direct contact with the
sense organ commonly known as the tongue.
2.Olfaction: chemicals in the nearby air –
from food or other substances – must come
into contact with cells in the nasal cavity.
(Pastorino, & Doyle-Portillo, 2013).
 Some Facts about Gustation
• There are about 10,000 taste buds on the tongue and
each taste bud contains approximately a dozen sensory
receptors, called taste cells.
• Taste cells are sensitive to chemicals in our food and
drink (Bartoshuk, 1988 in Lahey, 2012).
• Papillae are clusters of taste buds on the tongue that
respond to thousands of chemicals.
• There are taste buds that respond primarily to
chemicals that give rise to the sensation of sweetness
(mostly sugars), sourness (mostly acids), saltiness
(mostly salts), and bitterness (in response to a variety
of chemicals that have no food value or are toxic).
 Some Facts about Gustation
• There is evidence that there is a fifth type of taste bud,
which gives rise to the sensation of fattiness in response to
fats (Schiffman et al.,1998 in Lahey, 2012).
• Some scientists believe that there is another kind of taste
bud that give rise to the sensation called umami ( the
savory taste of meat stock, cheese, and mushrooms), but
this has been shown to arise from the same taste buds that
give rise to the sensation of sweetness( Li et al., 2002 in
Lahey, 2012).
• We lose taste buds as we age, especially over 45 years of
age. Babies have the most taste buds and are very
sensitive, whereas older adults are less sensitive to the
chemicals that give rise to taste sensation (Schiffman et
al.,1998 in Lahey, 2012).
 Other Senses: Chemical

Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of 4-18
McGraw-Hill Education.
 Some Facts about Olfaction
• Olfaction, our sense of smell, has adaptive value.
Smells can alert us to danger. The ability to smell
smoke enables us to detect a fire long before we
see flames ( Pastorino, & Doyle-Portillo, 2013).
• Chemicals in the air we breathe pass by the
olfactory receptors on their way to the lungs.
These sheet receptor cells are called olfactory
epithelium located at the top of the nasal cavity (
Pastorino, & Doyle-Portillo, 2013)..
 Some Facts about Olfaction
• Nearly all the chemicals that humans can detect
as odors are organic compounds, meaning they
come from living things. In contrast, we can smell
very few inorganic compounds such as rocks and
sand (Lahey, 2012).
• When it comes to discriminating between odors,
we can detect roughly 500,000 different scents
and we can identify by name about 10,000
different smells. us to capture our attention
( Pastorino, & Doyle-Portillo, 2013).
 Other Senses: Skin

Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of 4-21
McGraw-Hill Education.
 Other Senses: Skin (Cutaneous)

Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of 4-22
McGraw-Hill Education.
 Tactile
Some Facts about the Skin
• The skin can detect only three kinds of
sensory information such as pressure,
temperature, and pain.
• There are four types of receptors in the skin:
free nerve endings, the basket cells, the
tactile discs, and the specialized end bulbs.

Free nerve endings: sensory receptor cells in the
skin that detect pressure, temperature, and pain.
**Nocioreceptors in the free nerve endings serve as
receptors for stimuli that are experienced as painful
**Pain signals: are regulated in three parts of the
nervous system: the brain stem, the spinal cord, and
in the peripheral pain receptors

Basket cells: detect pressure

Tactile discs: detect pressure

Specialized end bulbs: detect pressure
 THE BODY SENSES
Vestibular Organ: a complicated set of sensory
structures located in the inner section of the ear,
where it provides the cerebral cortex with
information about orientation and movement.
Two Sets of Small Sensory Structures in Vestibular
Organ
1. Saccule and utricle: fluid-filled sacs in the inner
ear that contain sensory receptors that keep the
brain informed about the body’s orientation.
2. semicircular canal: provides the most sensitive
message to the brain about orientation.
 THE BODY SENSES
Kinesthetic Receptors

individual sensory receptors that provide
detailed information on the orientation of the
head and body, differences in pressure due to
gravity and movement on different parts of the
body, the movement of each part, and a host of
other kinds of information

located in the muscles, joints, and skin; provide
additional messages about movement, posture,
and orientation
 Perception: Interpreting Sensory
Messages
Perception: the interpretation of sensation. It’s
an active process in which perceptions are
created often go beyond the minimal
information provided by the senses.
Gestalt Principles of Perception
 Gestalt Principles of Perception
1. Figure-ground. When we perceive a visual stimulus,
part of what we see is the center of our attention, the
figure, and the rest is the indistinct ground.
2. Continuity. We tend to perceive lines or patterns that
follow a smooth contour as being part of a single unit.
3. Proximity. Things that are proximal (close together)
are usually perceived as belonging together.
4. Similarity. Similar things are perceived as being
related.
5. Closure. Missing sensory information is automatically
“filled in” in the process of perception to create complete
and whole perceptions
 Types of Perceptual Constancy
Perceptual constancy : the tendency for
perceptions of objects to remain relatively
unchanged in spite of changes in raw sensations.
** Brightness Constancy
** Color Constancy
** Size Constancy
** Shape Constancy
 Visual Perception: Constancy

Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of 4-31
McGraw-Hill Education.
 Depth Perception
Monocular Cues to Depth Perception can be perceived
by one eye. We use this monocular cues in everyday life
and artist manipulate them to create images in art that
appear to have depth on flat surfaces and to bring
computer-animated figures to life.
1. Texture Gradient. The texture of an object is larger and
more visible up close and smaller when far away. On curved
surfaces, the elements of texture are also more slanted when
the surface does not squarely face us.
2. Linear Perspective. Objects cast smaller images on the
retina when they are more distant. As a result, parallel lines,
such as railroad tracks, appear to grow closer together the
farther away they are from us.
 Monocular Cues:
Height in Field, Linear Perspective

Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of 4-33
McGraw-Hill Education.
 Monocular Cues: Texture Gradients

Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of 4-34
McGraw-Hill Education.
Monocular Cues: Shading
 Depth Perception
3. Superposition. Closer objects tend to be partially
in front of, or partially cover up, more distant
objects.
4. Shadowing. The shadows cast by objects and
highlights of reflected light suggest their depth.
5. Speed of Movement. Objects farther away
appear to move across the field of vision more
slowly than do closer objects.
6. Aerial Perspective. Water vapor and pollution in the air
scatter light waves, giving distant objects a bluish, hazy
appearance compared with nearby objects.
7. Accommodation. The shape of the lens of the eye
must change to focus the visual image on the retina from
stimuli that are different distances from the eye.
8. Vertical Position. When objects are on the ground, the
farther they appear to be below the horizon, the closer
they appear to be to us. For objects in the air, however,
the farther they appear to be above the horizon, the
closer they appear to us.
 Depth Perception
Binocular Cues in depth perception require both eyes to allow
us to perceive depth.
The two binocular cues are:
1. Convergence. When both eyes are looking at an
object in the center of the visual field, they must angle
inward more sharply for a near object than for a distant
object.
2. Retinal Disparity. Because our two eyes are a
couple of inches apart, they do not see the same view of
three- dimensional objects, especially when the object is
close. This disparity or difference, between the images on
the two retinas is a key factor in depth perception.
 VISUAL PERCEPTION: MOTION
Humans have specialized motion detectors

Apparent movement

Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of 4-39
McGraw-Hill Education.
 References
Lahey, B. (2012). Psychology: An Introduction.
(11th Ed.) NY: McGraw Hill.

Pastorino, E. & Doyle-Portillo, S. (2013). What is

Psychology? Essentials. (2nd Ed.) Canada:
Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.