Sensation & Perception

Consciousness. Consciousness is our subjective awareness of ourselves and our

environment. Consciousness consists of one’s moment-by-moment personal,
subjective experiences. Because each of us experiences consciousness personally,
we cannot know if any two people’s experiences, are the same. Consciousness
involves not just your sensations and thoughts but also your memories and
anything else you are experiencing in the moment.
Your mind and body do many things you are not consciously aware of. For instance,
you have many highly active biological systems, such as your immune system, but
you are not conscious of their functioning. At every moment, your brain is regulating
your body temperature and controlling your breathing without your awareness. You
are not conscious of most of the operations of the brain and mind that do these
things.
Consciousness is often described as a continuous stream, and thoughts float on that
stream. There is a limit, however, to how many things the mind can be conscious of
at the same time. As you read this text, are you focused intently on the material? Is
your mind wandering, occasionally or often? You cannot pay attention to reading
while doing several other things, such as watching television or talking to a friend.
As you focus on what is going on in the TV show, you might realize that you have no
idea what you just read or what your friend just said. Likewise, you can think about
what you will do tomorrow, what kind of car you would like to own, and where you
most recently went on vacation—but you cannot think about them all at the same
time. You are able to fully process only a limited amount of the information available
to you at any given time.
Change blindness: The limited nature of consciousness means that we often miss
things, even big things, because we are focusing on something else. Because we
cannot attend to everything in the vast array of visual information available, we are
often “blind” to large changes in our environments.
Attention. Attention involves being able to focus selectively on some things and
not others. Although they are not the same thing, attention and consciousness often
go hand in hand. For instance, imagine you are at a party and people are engaged
in conversations all around you. Despite all this noise, you are able to zero in on
what your friends are telling you about their recent vacation. Attention selects what
enters your limited consciousness. By selecting your friend’s voice to focus on and
ignoring other voices and sounds, you become consciously aware of the selected
information, which allows you to fully perceive and process it.
Sensation is the detection of physical stimuli and transmission of that information
to the brain. Physical stimuli can be light or sound waves, molecules of food or odor,
or temperature and pressure changes. Sensation is the basic detection of those
stimuli. It involves no interpretation of what we are experiencing.
Perception is the brain’s further processing, organization, and interpretation of
sensory information. Perception results in our conscious experience of the world.
Whereas the essence of sensation is detection, the essence of perception is the
construction of useful and meaningful information about a particular sensation.
Say that you drive up to a traffic signal as the light turns green. The light is detected
by specialized neurons in your eyes, and those neurons transmit signals to your
brain. As a result of these steps, you have sensed a stimulus: light. When your brain
processes the resulting neural signals, you experience the green light and register
the meaning of that signal: Go! As a result of these additional steps, you have
perceived the light and the signal.
Sensation and perception are integrated into experience. At the same time,
experience guides sensation and perception. In other words, the processing of
sensory information is a two-way street. Bottom-up processing is based on the
physical features of the stimulus. As each sensory aspect of a stimulus is processed,
the aspects build up into perception of that stimulus.
Top-down processing is how knowledge, expectations, or past experiences shape
the interpretation of sensory information. That is, context affects perception: What
we expect to see (higher level) influences what we perceive (lower level). We are
unlikely to see a blue, apple-shaped object as a real apple because we know from
past experience that apples are not blue.
Consider the incomplete letters in the figure below. The same shape appears in the

center of each word, but you perceive the shape first as H and then as A. Your
perception depends on which interpretation makes sense in the context of the
particular word. Likewise, Y0U C4N R3AD TH15 PR377Y W3LL even though it is
nonsensical. The ability to make sense of “incorrect” stimuli through top-down
processing is why proofreading our own writing can be so difficult.

Sensory and Perceptual Processing

Our sensory systems translate the physical properties of stimuli into patterns of
neural impulses. Each sense organ contains receptors designed to detect specific
types of stimuli. For example, receptors in the visual system respond only to light
waves and can signal only visual information.

Thresholds
At this moment, we are being struck by X-rays and radio waves, ultraviolet and
infrared light, and sound waves of very high and very low frequencies. To all of
these we are blind and deaf. Other animals with differing needs detect a world that
lies beyond our experience. Migrating birds stay on course aided by an internal
magnetic compass. Bats and dolphins locate prey using sonar, bouncing echoing
sound off objects. Bees navigate on cloudy days by detecting invisible (to us)
polarized light.
Our senses open the shades just a crack, allowing us a restricted awareness of this
vast sea of energy. But for our needs, this is enough.
Absolute Thresholds
To some stimuli we are exquisitely sensitive. Standing atop a mountain on an utterly
dark, perfectly clear night, most of us could see a candle flame atop another
mountain 30 miles (nearly 50 kilometers) away. We could feel the wing of a bee
falling on our cheek. We could smell a single drop of perfume in a three-room
apartment (Galanter, 1962).
German scientist and philosopher Gustav Fechner (1801–1887) studied the edge of
our awareness of these faint stimuli, which he called an absolute threshold. To test
your absolute threshold for sounds, a hearing specialist would send tones, at
varying levels, into each of your ears and record whether you could hear each tone.
The test results would show the point where, for any sound frequency, half the time
you could detect the sound and half the time you could not. That 50-50 point would
define your absolute threshold. Detecting a weak stimulus, or signal (such as a
hearing-test tone), depends not only on its strength but also on our psychological
state —our experience, expectations, motivation, and alertness.
Stimuli you cannot consciously detect 50 percent of the time are subliminal—below
your absolute threshold
Difference Thresholds
To function effectively, we need absolute thresholds low enough to allow us to
detect important sights, sounds, textures, tastes, and smells. We also need to
detect small differences among stimuli. A musician must detect minute
discrepancies when tuning an instrument. Parents must detect the sound of their
own child’s voice amid other children’s voices.
The difference threshold (or the just noticeable difference) is the minimum stimulus
difference a person can detect half the time.
Sensory Adaptation
It’s one of life’s little curiosities: You may not notice a fan’s noise until it’s turned on
or off. The same is true for odors. Sitting down on the bus, you are struck by your
seatmate’s heavy perfume. You wonder how she endures it, but within minutes you
no longer notice. Sensory adaptation has come to your rescue.
Our sensory systems are tuned to detect changes in our surroundings. It is
important for us to be able to detect such changes because they might require
responses. It is less important to keep responding to unchanging stimuli. Sensory
adaptation is a decrease in sensitivity to a constant level of stimulation. When
constantly exposed to an unchanging stimulus, we become less aware of it because
our nerve cells fire less frequently.
The Brain Constructs a Stable Representation of the World
from Five Senses
In general, we think of the five senses as operating independently because they
detect different environmental signals and engage different sense organs and brain
circuits. However, perception results from a construction of these signals into a
stable, unified representation of the world, and most of the things we perceive
involve more than one sensation. For instance, an orange engages your sense of
vision, touch, smell, and taste, and maybe even hearing as you peel off the skin.
The expectation of the taste you will experience when biting into an orange is based
on visual and odor cues and your past experiences that lead you to anticipate the
taste you associate with an orange. If, instead, you taste a lime, you might have an
especially strong reaction because your expectations were violated. At times, our
perception of one sense is influenced by input from another sense.

Visual Organization of Information

If we acquire knowledge through our senses, then vision is by far our most
important source of knowledge. Vision allows us to perceive information at a
distance.
Some people describe the human eye as working like a crude camera, in that it
focuses light to form an image. This analogy does not do justice to the intricate
processes that take place in the eye, however. Light first passes through the cornea,
the eye’s thick, transparent outer layer. The cornea focuses the incoming light,
which then enters the lens. There, the light is bent further inward and focused to
form an image on the retina, the thin inner surface of the back of the eyeball. The
retina’s millions of receptor cells convert the particles of light energy into neural
impulses and forward those to the brain.
The optic nerve is an information highway from the eye to the brain. This nerve can
send nearly 1 million messages at once. We pay a price for this high-speed
connection. Your eye has a blind spot, with no receptor cells, where the optic nerve
leaves the eye. Close one eye. Do you see a black hole? No, because, without
seeking your approval, your brain fills in the hole.
The information the retina projects to the brain results in a two-dimensional
representation of edges and colors that the brain automatically transforms into a
three-dimensional world of objects and background. Within the brain, what exactly
happens to the information the senses take in? How does that information get
organized? The visual system uses a number of organizing principles to help
determine the meaning of visual input—or the most likely interpretation based on
experience with the world. Perceptual psychologists attempt to characterize these
basic principles of visual perception.
Figure and ground
One of the visual system’s most basic organizing principles is distinguishing
between figure and ground. In order to simplify the visual world, we automatically
divide visual scenes into objects and background. Determining that a collection of
lines, shapes, and colors composes one figure or object in turn changes how we
perceive those visual cues moving forward.
Distinguishing the figure from the background is a basic organizing principle of
vision.
In the picture, you can see either a full vase or two faces
looking at each other—but not both at the same time. In
identifying either figure—indeed, any figure—the brain
assigns the rest of the scene to the background. In this
illusion, the “correct” assignment of figure and ground is
ambiguous. The figures periodically reverse (switch back and
forth) as the visual system strives to make sense of the
stimulation. In ways like this, visual perception is dynamic and
ongoing.

GESTALT PRINCIPLES OF PERCEPTUAL ORGANIZATION

Gestalt is a German word that means “shape” or “form.” Gestalt psychologists

theorized that perception is more than the result of a collection of sensory data; in
other words, the whole of perceptual experience is more than the sum of its parts.
They postulated that the brain uses innate principles to group sensory information
into organized wholes. One of these principles is that we automatically differentiate
figure from ground. But how do we determine what gets grouped together as a
figure or object in order to distinguish it from the background? How do we perceive,
say, “a car” as opposed to “metal, tires, glass, door handles, hubcaps, fenders,” and
so on? For us, an object exists as a unit, not as a collection of features. These
Gestalt grouping laws include:

 Proximity: The closer two figures are to each other, the more likely we are to
group them and see them as part of the same object.

 Similarity: We tend to group figures according to how closely they resemble

each other, whether in shape, color, or orientation.

 Continuation: We tend to group together edges or contours that are smooth

and continuous as opposed to those having abrupt or sharp edges

 Closure: We tend to complete figures that have gaps. The principles of good
continuation and closure sometimes can result in seeing contours, shapes,
 and cues to depth when they do not exist, as is the case with illusory
contours.

OBJECT CONSTANCY Once we perceive a collection of sensory information as

belonging to the same object, object constancy leads us to perceive the object as
unchanging despite changes in sensory data that compose the object. Consider
your image in the mirror. What you see in the mirror might look like it is your actual
size, but the image is much smaller than the parts of you being reflected.
For the most part, changing an object’s angle, distance, or illumination does not
change our perception of that object’s size, shape, color, or lightness. But to
perceive any of these constancies, we need to understand the relationship between
the object and at least one other factor. For size constancy, we need to know how
far away the object is from us (See figure below).

For shape constancy, we need to know what angle or angles we are seeing the
object from. For lightness constancy, we need to know how much light is being
reflected from the object and from its background. In order to see objects as
constant despite changes in size, shape or lightness, the brain computes the
relative magnitude of the sensory signals it receives. The perceptual system’s
ability to make relative judgments allows it to maintain constancy across various
perceptual contexts.
Although their precise mechanisms are unknown, these constancies illustrate that
perceptual systems do not just respond to sensory inputs. Perceptual systems are in
fact tuned to detect changes from baseline conditions.
Audition (Hearing)
Like our other senses, our hearing—audition—helps us adapt and survive.
Sound waves, hit the eardrum and are converted to neural signals that travel to the
brain along the auditory nerve. This conversion of sound waves to brain activity
produces the sensation of sound. The auditory nerve carries the neural messages to
your thalamus and then on to the auditory cortex in your brain’s temporal lobe.