Sensation and Perception

Learning objectives of this Lecture

Upon the completion of this session the students will be

able to:
1. define Sensation.
2. define Perception
3. Explain the steps in the perceptual process.
4. Describe how is perception measured.
Introduction
• Sensations to tell us what is outside our own mental
world, window to the world that exists around us.
• Sensation occurs when special receptors in the sense
organs —the eyes, ears, nose, skin, and taste are
activated, allowing various forms of outside stimuli
to become neural signals in the brain.
• The sensory receptors are specialized forms of neuron.
Instead of receiving neurotransmitters from other cells,
these receptor cells are stimulated by different kinds of
energy.
Cont.… Example
➢the receptors in the eyes are stimulated by light,
where as the receptors in the ears are activated by
vibrations, touch receptors are stimulated by
pressure, temperature, and the receptors for taste
and smell are triggered by chemical substances
 Definitions of Sensation
❖the process that occurs when special receptors in the
sense organs are activated, allowing various forms
of outside stimuli to become neural signals in the
brain.
❖The process of detecting stimulus.
❖Stimulus: something that attracts the attention
of a sensory organ.
❖The stimulation of sensory receptors and the
transmission of sensory information to the central
nervous system.
Terms
❖Transduction:
❖the process of converting outside stimuli, such as light,
into neural activity.
❖Synesthesia:
❖disorder in which the signals from the various sensory
organs are processed in the wrong cortical areas, resulting
in the sense information being interpreted as more than
one sensation.
❖Subliminal stimuli:
Stimuli that are below the level of conscious awareness.
(The word limin means “threshold,” so sublimin means
“below the threshold.)
Cont…
• Absolute threshold: isthe lowest level of stimulation that
a person can consciously detect 50 percent of the
time the stimulation is present.
• Sensory Adaptation: a process by which we become less
aware of weak stimuli if a stimulus is unchanging. is
another process by which constant, unchanging
information from the sensory receptors is effectively
ignored.
• Habituation: is tendency of the brain to stop attending
to constant, unchanging information.
 Explain why some sensory information is
ignored?
• Some of the lower centers of the brain filter sensory stimulation and
“ignore” or prevent conscious attention to stimuli that do not change. The
brain is primarily interested in changes in information. That’s why people
don’t really “hear” the noise of the air conditioner unless it suddenly cuts
off, or the noise made in some classrooms, unless it gets very quiet or
someone else directs their attention toward it. Although they actually are
hearing it, they aren’t paying attention to it. This is called habituation, and
it is the way the brain deals with unchanging information from the
environment.
• In habituation, the sensory receptors are still responding to stimulation, but
the lower centers of the brain are not sending the signals from those
receptors to the cortex.
 Sensory Overload

Overstimulation of the senses:

Can use selective attention to reduce sensory overload.
Selective Attention: focusing of attention on selected aspects of the
environment and the blocking out of others.
5 Senses
The Perceptual Process

• Stimulus
• All objects in the environment are available to the observer.
• Observer selectively attends to objects.
• Stimulus impinges on receptors resulting in internal
representation.
The Perceptual Process - continued

• Electricity
• Transduction occurs which changes environmental energy to
nerve impulses
• Transmission occurs when signals from the receptors travel to
the brain.
• Processing occurs during interactions among neurons in the
brain.
 Perception

process by which the brain organizes & interprets sensory information

using sensory information to form a meaningful pattern.
Perception: is the method by which the brain takes all the sensations a
person experiences at any given moment and allows them to be
interpreted in some meaningful fashion. For example, two people might
be looking at a cloud, and while one thinks it’s shaped like a horse, the
other thinks it’s more like a cow. They both see the same cloud, but they
perceive that cloud differently
Figure 1.4 Comparison of signal transmission by cell phone and the nervous system. (a) Cell
phone #1 sends an electrical signal that stands for “hello.” The signal that reaches cell phone #2 is
the same as the signal sent from cell phone #1. (b) The nervous system sends electrical signals
that stand for the moth. The nervous system processes these electrical signals, so the signal
responsible for perceiving the moth is different than the original signal sent from the eye.
 Sensation Vs Perception

Sensation is the act by sensory receptors like your ears,

eyes, and skin, receiving information from the world
and transducing it into neuronal signals that get sent
up to the brain. Perception is the experience and
interpretation of those signals as they processed by the
brain.
 Illusion

• An illusion is a perception that does not

correspond to reality: People think they see
something when the reality is quite different.
• Illusions are not hallucinations: An illusion is a
distorted perception of something that is really
there, but a hallucination originates in the brain,
not in reality.)
 Factors That Influence Perception
1. Our needs affect our perception because we are
more likely to perceive something we need.
2. Our beliefs can affect what we perceive.
3. Emotions, such as fear, can influence perceptions of
sensory information.
4. Our culture can affect what we perceive.
5. Expectations based on our previous experiences
influence how we perceive the world.
 Cont..
• People often misunderstand what is said to them
because they were expecting to hear something else.
People’s tendency to perceive things a certain way
because their previous experiences or expectations
influence them is called perceptual set or perceptual
expectancy.
• Although expectancies can be useful in interpreting
certain stimuli, they can also lead people down the
wrong path. What you see depends upon what you expect
to see.
 Question

Describe how we get information from the

outside world into our brains?
Thank you