Perception and Sensation

Hafiz Mudasir
student
Forman Christian College

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 The Eye
• Light enters the eye through a transparent
window at the front of the cornea.
• Cornea and lens form an upside down
image of object on the retina.
• The lens is the transparent eye structure.
It is made of relatively soft tissue, capable
of adjustment called accommodation.
• Nearsightedness
• Farsightedness
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 The eye……
• The pupil is the opening in the center of
the iris that helps regulate the amount of
light passing into the rear chamber of the
eye.
• It constricts and dilates
• Retina: It is the neural tissue lining the
inside back surface of the eye. It absorbs
light processes images and sends
information to the brain.
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 The eye……
• The axons that run from the retina to the brain
converge at the optic disk, a hole in the retina.
It is also called the blind spot.
• Visual Receptors: There are two types of
receptors: rods and cones. Rods are elongated
and cones are stubbier. Rods outnumber the
cones.
• Cones are specialized visual receptors that play
a key role in daylight vision and color.

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 The eye…..
• The fovea is a tiny spot in the center of the
retina that contains only cones.
• Rods are specialized visual receptors that play a
key role in night vision and peripheral vision.
• Dark and light adaptations: in dark adaptation
the eyes become more sensitive to light in low
illumination. And in light adaptation the eyes
become less sensitive to light in high
illumination.

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 Visual pathway to the brain
• Axon leaving the back of each eye form the optic
nerves which travel to the optic chiasm.
• Optic chiasm is the point at which the optic
nerves from inside half of each eye cross over
and then project to the opposite half of the brain.
• TWO PATHWAYS: The main pathway projects
into the thalamus and then pass to the primary
visual cortex.
• The second pathway leaving the optic chiasm
branches off to a an area in the brain called the
superior colliculus before traveling to the
thalamus and then into the occipital lobe.
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 Feature analysis
• Feature analysis is the process of
detecting specific elements in visual input
and assembling them into a more complex
form. It has two kinds
• 1. Bottom up processing, a progression
from individual elements to the whole.
• 2. Top down processing is a progression
from the whole to the elements. (Word)
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 Gestalt Principles
• Phi phenomenon is the illusion of movement
created by presenting visual stimuli in succession.
• Figure and ground
• Proximity: Things that are near one another
seem to belong together.
• Similarity: Grouping stimuli that are together.
• Continuity: Tendency to follow in whatever
direction they’ve been led.
• Simplicity: Organizing forms in the simple way
possible.
• Closure:

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 Pictorial depth cues
• Pictorial depth cues—cues about distance that can be
given in a flat picture. Some of them are:
• Linear perspective is a depth cue reflecting the fact that
lines converge in the distance.
• Texture gradient gives cues when the texture is coarse
for near areas and finer for more distant ones.
• Relative size is a cue because closer objects appear
larger.
• Height in planes reflects the fact that distant objects
appear higher in a picture.
• Light and shadow can create an impression of three
dimensional forms.
• In interposition the shapes of near objects overlap or
mask those of more distant ones.
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 Some important concepts
• A perceptual constancy is a tendency to
experience a stable perception in the face
of continually changing sensory input.
• An optical illusion involves an apparently
inexplicable discrepancy between the
appearance of a visual stimulus and its
physical reality.

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 The auditory system
• Sound waves move at a fraction of the speed of
light. They are generated by vibration.
• Structure of the ear: The human ear can be
divided into three sections: the external ear, the
middle ear, and the inner ear.
• Sound is conducted differently in each section.
• The external ear depends on the vibration of the
air molecules. The middle ear depends on the
vibration of movable bones. And the inner ear
depends on the waves in a fluid.

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 Sections of the ear
• The external ear consists mainly of the pinna, a sound
collecting cone. The sound waves are then are then
funneled along the auditory canal toward the eardrum.
• In the middle ear the vibrations from the eardrum are
transmitted to the three tiniest bones in the human body.
They are (hammer, anvil, and stirrup) called ossicles.
The ossicles serve to amplify tiny changes in air
pressure.
• The inner ear consists largely of the cochlea (spiraled
shaped snail), a fluid filled coiled tunnel that contains the
receptors for hearing. The sound waves enter the
cochlea through oval window.

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• The neural tissue lies within the cochlea on the
basilar membrane that divides the cochlea into
upper and lower chambers.
• The basilar membrane runs through the cochlea
and it holds the auditory receptors called the hair
cells. Sound waves in the fluid of inner ear
stimulated the hair cells which convert the
physical stimulation into the neural impulse.
• This neural impulse is sent to the thalamus from
where it is forwarded to the temporal lobes.

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 Taste and smell
• The gustatory receptors are clusters of taste cells found in
the taste buds on the tongue.
• When these taste buds absorb saliva, they trigger neural
impulses that are routed through the thalamus to the
cortex.
• Taste cells have a short life, spanning only a few days.
New cells are constantly formed
• There are four basic tastes: sweet sour, salty, and bitter.
• Some taste preferences appear to be innate (sweet—
newborn) However, they are influenced by the social
processes.
• There are people who are called super tasters who have
four times more taste buds.
• Women are super tasters than men.
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 Taste and smell…..
• Taste and smell are interact.
• Smell: The physical stimuli are chemical in nature
that can evaporate and be carried by the air.
• The receptors for smell are olfactory cilia, hair like
structures located in the upper portion of the nasal
passages. They are constantly replaced.
• The olfactory receptors have axons that synapse
directly with cells in the olfactory bulb at the base
of the brain. It is the only sense that does not go
through the thalamus.
• Smell reduces to half of its original strength in 4
mins.
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 Touch
• Sight is as much trusted as the sense of touch.
• The physical stimuli for the touch are thermal, chemical,
and mechanical.
• The human skin is saturated with at least six kinds of
receptors. To some degree they are specialized for
different functions such as pressure, hot, cold, etc.
• The nerve fibers that carry incoming information about
tactile stimulation are routed through the spinal cord to
the brainstem.
• There (brainstem) the fibers from each side of the body
cross over mostly to the opposite side of the brain. The
tactile pathway then projects through the thalamus and
onto the somatosensory cortex in the brain’ parietal lobe.

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 Touch……..
• The receptors for pain are mostly free nerve endings in
the skin.
• Pain messages are transmitted to the brain via two types
of pathways that pass through different areas of the
thalamus.
• One is the fast pathway that registers localized pain and
relays it to the cortex in the fraction of a second. This
pathway is mediated by thick myelinated neurons called
A delta fibers.
• The second system uses a slow pathway that lags a
second or two behind the fast system. This pathway
conveys long lasting, aching or burning pain that comes
after the initial injury. This pathway is mediated by thin
unmyelinated neurons called C fiber.
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 Other senses
• The kinesthetic system monitors the position of
the various parts of the body. The receptors for
kinesthetic sense reside in the joints, indicating
how much they are bending. Or in the muscles.
• Vestibular system which responds to gravity and
keeps you informed of your body’ location in
space. It provides a sense of balance,
compensating for changes in the body’s position.
The vestibular system shares space in the inner
ear with the auditory system.
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