SENSATION AND PERCEPTION

What is a Sensation?
Sensation
• Sensations - the passive process of bringing information from the outside
world into the body and to the brain
• A stimulus is any source of physical
energy that produces a response in a
sense organ.
• A stimulus can be measured in a variety of
ways including it’s size, duration, intensity,
or wavelength.
• A Sensation occurs anytime a stimulus
activates one of your receptors.
• The sense organs then detect any change
in energy, such as light, heat, sound, and
physical pressure.
What is sensation?
• Sensation occurs when special
receptors in the sense organs—
the eyes, ears, nose, skin, and
taste buds—are activated,
allowing various forms of
outside stimuli to become
neural signals in the brain.
• This process of converting
outside stimuli, such as light,
into neural activity is called
transduction. (“translate”)
• The sensory receptors are specialized forms of
neurons
• Instead of receiving neurotransmitters from other
cells, these receptor cells are stimulated by different
kinds of energy
• the receptors in the eyes are stimulated by light
• the receptors in the ears are activated by vibrations.
• Touch receptors are stimulated by pressure or
temperature
• the receptors for taste and smell are triggered by
chemical substances.
• Each receptor type transduces the physical
information into electrical information in different
ways
 Sensory
Grounding
activity

https://www.youtube.com/watc
h?v=LgRd1Mzhb_Q
Is there a sixth sense?
Proprioception
• Proprioception is your brains automatic system for sensing the
position of your body in space.
• It helps us know where our limbs (arms and legs) are.
• Example:
This sense helps you eat your popcorn while keeping your eyes focused
on the tv screen.
Being able to walk or kick without looking at your feet
• Brain still needs visual input to back up the sense of body awareness.
• That is why, it was difficult to carry out the activity when eyes were
closed.
Have you ever wondered….
• Why can some people notice the faintest smells or hear a distant
sound that others can’t?
• A threshold is the point or level at which something begins to happen
or change. In general terms, it refers to the minimum level of intensity
required for a specific response or action to occur.
• A sensory threshold is the minimum level of stimulus intensity
required for a sensory receptor to detect a stimulus and trigger a
neural response. It marks the point at which a stimulus becomes
detectable to the senses.
• a threshold refers to the minimum level of stimulation necessary for a
person to detect a stimulus (such as sound, light, or touch).
Absolute threshold
• when does a stimulus become
strong enough to be detected
by our sense organs?
• An absolute threshold is the
smallest intensity of a stimulus
that must be present for it to be
detected.
• Our senses are extremely
responsive to stimuli. For
example, Bee wing
Difference threshold
• Ernst Weber (1795–1878) did studies trying to determine the smallest difference
between two weights that could be detected.
• His research led to the formulation known as Weber’s law of just noticeable
differences (jnd, or the difference threshold).
• A jnd is the smallest difference between two stimuli that is detectable 50 percent
of the time, and Weber’s law simply means that whatever the difference
between stimuli might be, it is always a constant.

• Noticing distinctions between stimuli

• Difference threshold (just noticeable difference): The smallest level of added or
reduced stimulation required to sense that a change in stimulation has occurred.
• Example: You increase the volume of the car by one level and someone
complains that its too loud.
•If you’re carrying a backpack that weighs 1 kg and add 200 grams, you’ll likely notice the difference.
But if the backpack already weighs 10 kg, adding 200 grams may not feel noticeable at all.
•Daily example: Carrying groceries — adding a small item (like a banana) to a light grocery bag is
noticeable, but the same item added to a heavy bag might go unnoticed.
…difference that is always constant
• If you’re holding a small toy that weighs 1 kg, you might notice when
0.1 kg (100 grams) is added.
• But if you’re holding a much heavier toy that weighs 10 kg, you might
only notice when 1 kg is added.
You all see the same cloud, but
everyone perceives that cloud
differently.
Perception
• Perception is the sorting out,
interpretation, analysis, and
integration of stimuli carried out
by the sense organs and brain.
• The active process of selecting,
organizing, and interpreting the
information brought to the brain by
the senses
You all see the same cloud, but
you perceive that cloud
differently.

……Can we infer that

perception is an individual
process?
• As individual as perception might be, some similarities exist in how
people perceive the world around them.
• This is called perceptual constancy.
Size constancy
• The tendency to interpret an object as
always being the same size, regardless
of its distance from the viewer (or the
size of the image it casts on the retina).
• So if an object that is normally
perceived to be about 6 feet tall
appears very small on the retina, it will
be interpreted as being very far away.
Shape constancy
• Another perceptual constancy is the
tendency to interpret the shape of an
object as constant, even when it
changes on the retina.
• This shape constancy is why a
person still perceives a coin as a
circle even if it is held at an angle
that makes it appear to be an oval
on the retina.
Brightness constancy
• the tendency to per ceive the apparent
brightness of an object as the same even
when the light conditions change.
• If a person is wearing black pants and a
white shirt in broad day light the shirt will
appear to be much brighter than the pants.
• But if the sun is covered by thick clouds,
even though the pants and shirt have less
light to reflect than previously, the shirt will
still appear to be just as much brighter than
the pants as before—because the different
amount of light reflected from each piece
of clothing is still the same difference as
before
Gestalt Principles of Perception or Perceptual Organization

• Gestalt’s original focus on human perception can still be seen in

certain basic principles today, including the Gestalt tendency to group
objects and perceive whole shapes.

• Ciccarelli Pg no 118
Depth Perception
• Monocular and Binocular Cues: Ciccarelli Pg no 120
Perceptual illusions
• An illusion is a perception that does not correspond to reality: People
think they see something when the reality is quite different. Another way
of thinking of illusions is as visual stimuli that “fool” the eye.
• (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.)
• Research involving illusions can be very useful for both psychologists and
neuroscientists. These studies often provide valuable information about
how the sensory receptors and sense organs work and how humans
interpret sensory input.
• Sometimes illusions are based on early sensory processes, subsequent
processing, or higher-level assumptions made by the brain’s visual system
The Hermann Grid
• Gray blobs or diamonds at intersections that fade away or disappear
completely when you try to look directly at them. This is the Hermann grid.
• The illusion happens because some neurons, called "simple cells," respond
to lines of light at certain angles. These cells were discovered by scientists
David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. They also found other cells: "complex
cells" that react to movement and "end-stopped cells" that notice corners
and curves. All these cells (together called feature detectors) help the brain
detect specific parts of what we see.
• For the Hermann grid illusion, straight lines are needed. If the lines are
curved, the illusion goes away, which shows our brain processes straight
edges in a special way.
Muller Lyer Illusion
Why do we face this illusion?
• Most people are used to seeing
buildings with corners.
• When you're outside a building, the
corner feels close, and the walls
seem to move away, like inward-
facing angles.
• When you're inside, the corner feels
far, and the walls seem to come
closer, like outward-facing angles.
• Our minds treat the inward angles
like outside building corners, pulling
them closer, and the outward angles
like inside corners, making them
seem farther away.
• Marshall Segall and his team found that
people in Western cultures, where
buildings have lots of straight lines and
corners (a "carpentered world"), are
more likely to be fooled by this illusion.
• People from non-Western cultures, like
those living in round huts with fewer
corners (an "uncarpentered world"), are
less affected.
• For example, Richard Gregory found
that Zulus, who live in round huts and
use curved tools, rarely see this illusion
because they don’t encounter as many
straight lines and corners.
Moon Illusion
• The moon on the horizon* appears to be
much larger than the moon in the sky
• One explanation for the moon illusion is that
when the moon is high in the sky, it appears
alone without anything to compare its size to.
• But when it's on the horizon, it's seen behind
trees and houses, which makes the horizon
seem far away. Because the moon looks
farther away but still large, our brain
"magnifies" it, misapplying the idea of size
constancy.
• This explanation is called the apparent
distance hypothesis. It was first written about
by the astronomer Ptolemy in the 2nd century
A.D. and later expanded by the Arab
astronomer Al-Hazan in the 11th century.
 Illusions of motion
• Illusions of motion occur when
we perceive something as
moving when it is actually still.
• One example is the autokinetic effect,
where a small, stationary light in a
dark room seems to move because
there are no visual cues to show it's
still.
• Another example is stroboscopic
motion, like in movies, where a fast
series of still images appears to be
moving. Flipping through pages with
small drawings can also create this
illusion of movement.
• Another example of the stroboscopic
effect is the phi phenomenon, in
which lights turned on in sequence
appear to move.
Seeing Motion in Static Images
• “Rotating Snakes” Illusion
• Dr. Akiyoshi Kitaoka
Perceptual set
• Perceptual set refers to the tendency for our expectations,
experiences, and assumptions to influence how we perceive things.
• It acts as a mental filter that can make us more likely to notice certain
aspects of a situation while ignoring others.
• In other words, perceptual set shapes what we expect to see or hear,
and these expectations can affect how we interpret sensory
information.
• For example, if you're expecting to hear your phone ring, you might
misinterpret a similar sound as your ringtone due to your perceptual
set.
• Think about a situation where you’re in a classroom and the teacher
mentions a specific topic, like “dinosaurs.” If you love dinosaurs, you
might suddenly pay extra attention and notice every mention of them
in your textbooks or conversations. Your interest and expectation of
hearing about dinosaurs create a perceptual set, making you more
aware of related information while ignoring other topics being
discussed.
Working on a jigsaw puzzle is easier if you have a picture of the
final puzzle to guide you or if you've done the puzzle before. In
perception, this is called top-down processing, where you use
prior knowledge to piece things together into a whole. This is
also known as perceptual expectancy.
• For example. When you read a sentence, your brain uses context and
prior knowledge of language to predict and fill in words, even if some
letters are missing or jumbled.
• For instance, seeing “I lvoe to eat ckaes” may be quickly interpreted
as “I love to eat cakes” due to your understanding of language
patterns.