Module 1.

6
Sensation
Processing
Sensation &
Perception
Sensation is the
process by which our
sensory receptors and
nervous system receive
and represent stimulus
energies from our
environment. Perception
is the process of
organizing and
interpreting sensory
information, enabling us
to recognize meaningful
objects and events.
Processing Our
World
Under normal conditions, sensation and perception blend into one
continuous process, working together to help you decipher the
world around you.

Bottom-up processing: analysis that begins with the sensory

receptors and works up to the brain’s integration of sensory
information (sensation first)
Top-down processing: information processing guided by
higher-level mental processes , as when we construct
perceptions drawing on our experiences and expectations
(experience first)

While walking through an art museum, you come to the

abstract art section. If you used bottom-up processing,
you would stare at the piece and try to figure out what
the artist was trying to create. If you used top-down
processing, you would read the title of the work and look
for elements of that in the painting.
Just a rose, or something more
romantic?

And why is this painting called “The Forest Has

Eyes”?
Transduction

All of our senses receive sensory

stimulation, transform that information into
neural impulses, and deliver information to
the brain. The process of converting one
form of energy to another (or, in this case,
converting sensory stimulation into neural
signals) is called transduction. Transduction
of all senses involves three steps:
Receiving sensory stimulation, transforming
that stimulation into neural impulses, and
finally delivering those neural impulses to the
brain.
The field of psychophysics studies the
relationships between the physical
characteristics of stimuli and our
psychological experience of them.
Signal Detection
Theory
Detection of a stimulus not only relies on the
strength of the stimulus, but also our psychological
state - our experience, expectations, motivation,
alertness, etc. Signal detection theory predicts how
and when we detect the presence of a faint
stimulus amid background stimulation, thus
assuming there is no single absolute threshold and
that detection depends on the person.

Remember doing hearing tests as a kid?

You would raise your hand if you heard a
sound and stay still if you didn’t. If during the
test you got distracted, or you were so
focused you thought you heard something
that wasn’t there, it could skew the results of
the test. Khan Academy Review
Subliminal
Perception

Stimuli you cannot consciously detect

50% of the time are subliminal, or below
your absolute threshold.
Can we be controlled by subliminal
messages? Some advertisers sneak
subliminal messages into their
marketing in hopes of increasing
sales.
Seeing is Priming is a phenomenon in which
exposure to one stimulus influences how a
person responds to a subsequent, related
Believing stimulus. Through experience, we come to
expect certain results. Those expectations
may give us a perceptual set - a mental
predisposition to perceive one thing and
not another.
Thresholds
In order for a neuron to fire, the
threshold to trigger an impulse must be
reached. This principle continues with
sensation. The absolute threshold is the
minimum amount of stimulus energy needed
to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the
time. The concept of absolute thresholds
was studied by Gustav Fechner.
Difference Threshold
Absolute thresholds deal with detection of
one stimulus, while difference thresholds
(a.k.a. just noticeable difference) note the
minimum difference between two stimuli
required for detection 50% of the time.
Ernest Weber described this phenomenon
with a new principle - Weber’s law. Weber’s
law states that, to be perceived as different,
two stimuli must differ by a constant
percentage rather than a constant amount.
Consider playing with light dimmers.
How much do you need to move the
dimmer switch to see something as
darker or lighter than before?
Sensory
Adaptation
Earlier, we stated that if our brain was giving equal
attention to all the information it received, we’d go crazy. This is
one of the reasons our brain is primed to detect change and
ignore constants. Sensory adaptation is diminished sensitivity as
a consequence of constant stimulation or exposure.
When you know the water is cold, you are hesitant
to jump in, but all the adults say the same thing - “you’ll
get used to it after a few minutes”. You jump in, are
frozen for a moment, and then start to acclimate to the
water.
Up until now, you have ignored much of your
senses because they’ve been exposed to constants, but
now that I’m bringing it to your attention (the smell of
the room or your perfume, the feeling of the clothes on
your skin), you notice it again.
Light Energy
Light travels in waves, and the shape of
those waves influences what we see. Light’s
wavelength (distance from the peak of one
wave to the next) determines the hue
(color). The wave’s amplitude (height)
determines the intensity (the amount of
energy the wave contains) or brightness.
The purity of the wave determines how vivid
the color appears.
The Eye Light enters the cornea (the eye’s
clear, protective layer) and then the
pupil (adjustable opening of the eye
allowing light to pass through) whose
size is determined by the iris (colored
ring of muscle tissue). Light is then
focused by the lens (transparent
structure which changes shape to focus
images) on the retina (the light
sensitive inner surface of the eye with
layers of neurons to convert light into
neural impulses). The process of
focusing these images is called
accommodation. These neural
impulses are carried to the brain via the
optic nerve.
Information Processing in the
Eye
Rods: retinal receptors that detect black, white, and
gray, are sensitive to movement and are necessary
for peripheral vision
Cones: retinal receptors concentrated near the
center of the retina responsible for daylight/color
vision
Blind Spot: the point at which the optic nerve exits
the eye so there is an absence of receptor cells
Fovea: the central focal point in the retina, around
which the eye’s cones cluster → where visual acuity
is greatest
Ganglion cells: final output neurons of the retina
which collects the electrical messages concerning
the visual signal from the two layers of nerve cells
preceding it
Bipolar cells: transport information from rods and
cones to ganglion cells
Color Processing
This apple is obviously red, right? Of course!
But actually, the apple is everything but red,
because it rejects the wavelengths we process as
red and absorbs the rest. Light waves are
colorless but our brain perceives them in color.
Color vision is largely a mystery, but we have some
theories to explain how we see a world in color.
Young-Helmholtz Trichromatic Theory states that the
retina contains three different types of color
receptors for three basic colors - red, green, and
blue - which when stimulated can come together to
form every color.
Why not yellow? Because when both red and green
receptors are stimulated, we see yellow.
Opponent Process Theory
But why do people blind to red and green often still
see yellow? And why does yellow appear to be a pure color
and not a mixture of red and green, the way purple is of red
and blue?
Opponent-process theory states that color vision
depends on three sets of opposing retinal processes—red-
green, blue-yellow, and white-black. As impulses travel to
the visual cortex, some neurons in both the retina and the
thalamus are turned “on” by red but turned “off” by green. If
exposed to one color for an extended period, the opposite
will appear in the afterimage.

Stare at the red circle for 30 seconds. Look at

X nothing else. After the 30 seconds are up, move
your eyes to the X. You should see an afterimage of
a red background with a green spot.
Feature Detection

Feature detectors are nerve cells in

the visual cortex respond to specific
features, such as edges, angles,
and movement. For humans, we
have specialized feature detectors
for faces.
Damage to these feature detectors
or the area of the temporal lobe
responsible for facial recognition
could lead to prosopagnosia
(also known as face blindness or
facial agnosia)- a neurological
disorder characterized by the
inability to recognize faces.
 Parallel processing refers to our ability to analyze
Parallel many aspects of a problem (or in this case, a
sensation) simultaneously. When we see something,
Processing we take in the object’s color, shape, size, movement,
and distance for us all at once.
Sound Audition is our sense of hearing. Like light, sound travels in
waves. Sound waves are composed of compression and
rarefaction of air molecules. The height of the wave, or amplitude,

Waves
determines the volume of the sound, measured in decibels. The
frequency (number of wavelengths that pass a point in a given
time) determines the pitch (highness or lowness of tone).
 The Ear

Sound waves are funneled into the auditory canal

by the pinna (exterior part of ear). Once in the ear canal,
sound waves vibrate the eardrum (tight membrane
preceding the middle ear), then the hammer/malleus,
anvil/incus, and stirrup/stapes (also known as the
ossicles), finally vibrating the oval window of the
cochlea (the coiled, bony, fluid-filled tube of the inner
ear responsible for transduction of sound). The cochlea
is lined with a basilar membrane (a layer of hair cells
which convert the sound waves into neural impulses).
Neural impulses are carried to the brain via the auditory
nerve.
Seated above the cochlea but not involved in auditory
processing are the semicircular canals - fluid-filled tubes
used by the vestibular sense to sense body position.
Hearing Loss
There are two types of hearing loss or
deafness:
Sensorineural hearing loss (a.k.a. Nerve
deafness): inability to hear due to damage
to the cochlea’s receptor cells or to the
auditory nerves
Can be caused by repeated/prolonged
exposure to loud sounds
Can be helped by a cochlear implant
Conduction hearing loss: inability to hear
due to damage to mechanical elements of
the ear (parts other than the cochlea)
Can be helped by a hearing aid
Losing Audition
How is our sense of hearing
impacted by high frequency
sounds?
Because high frequency sounds create
more movement among hair cells, they
overwork the cells and can cause them to
decay faster than they would normally.
How does hearing change as we
age?
Hearing has a critical period, meaning that
it will decline as we age. Hearing can be
protected by avoid continuous loud and/or
high-pitched sounds, and can be preserved
by the use of hearing aids or cochlear
implants.
Theories of Hearing
Place theory states that the pitch Frequency theory states that the
of a sound we hear is due to entirety of the basilar membrane
activation of specific hair cells on the vibrates in response to sound, and
basilar membrane (like a piano). the speed of the vibration is how we
perceive pitch (like a drum).
Sound Localization
Because we have two
ears, sounds that reach
one ear faster than the
other ear cause us to
localize the sound, or
determine the direction of
the sound’s source.
Touch
Touch, our tactile sense, is vital to our
development and survival. Contact comfort
helps us establish bonds with caregivers,
and premature babies have a better
chance of survival if they are held. The
tactile sensations include pain, pressure,
touch and temperature, and are processed
by our parietal lobe.
Gate-Control Theory of Pain
Pain tells the body that something has gone
wrong, usually resulting from damage to the
skin and other tissues. Pain begins at
sensory neurons known as nociceptors.
Melzak and Wall (1965, 1983) proposed that
our spinal cord contains neurological “gates”
that either block pain or allow it to be sensed.
Gate-control theory states that the spinal
cord acts as a buffer between pain and the
brain, deciding which signals will pass
through; pain is a function of the balance
between the information traveling into the
spinal cord through large nerve fibers and
information traveling into the spinal cord
through small nerve fibers.
Phantom Limbs
& Endorphins
Pain is not merely a physical phenomenon
of injured nerves sending impulses to a
definable brain or spinal cord area. The
brain can also create pain, as it does in
phantom limb sensations after a limb
amputation. Without normal sensory input,
the brain may misinterpret and amplify
spontaneous but irrelevant central nervous
system activity. As the dreamer may see
with eyes closed, so 7 in 10 such people
feel pain or movement in nonexistent limbs.
As we learned last unit, endorphins serve as
natural painkillers, thus preventing pain
signals from going to the brain.
Smell
Olfaction, or our sense of smell, is also a
chemical sense and works closely with taste through a
process called sensory interaction (when one sense
influences another). This is why if you plug your nose
or have a bad sinus infection and can’t smell, you also
lose your sense of taste.
Odorants enter the nasal cavity to stimulate 5 million
receptors in the olfactory bulb to sense smell, and then
it bypasses the thalamus and goes straight to the
temporal lobe to be processed. Scientists suspect this
is an evolutionary trait, as smell is our first indication
that food has spoiled and will likely make us ill if
consumed. This could also explain why smell is closely
connected to memory; if something made us ill in the
past, its smell will be a reminder not to eat it again
(taste aversion).
Taste
Gustation, or our sense of taste, is a chemical sense.
There are six identified taste sensations:
Sweet - helps us identify sugary foods for energy
Sour - helps us identify foods that have gone bad or
could make us sick
Salty - sodium is essential for physiological
functioning
Bitter - helps us identify poison or foods that could
make us sick
Umami (savory) - helps us identify foods high in
protein which help grow/repair tissue
Oleogustus - carbs/fats for energy, insulation, & cell
growth
The small bumps on the surface of the tongue are
called papillae. They serve as our taste receptors.
Sensory
Interaction
Sensory interaction refers to the ability
of one sense to influence or interact
with another. Two senses that
commonly interact with each other are
taste and smell. So, the taste of
strawberry interacts with its smell and
its texture on the tongue to produce
flavor.
Vestibular vs. Kinetic Senses
The vestibular sense monitors The sense of our individual body
the head and body position, as well parts’ position and movement is
as, our sense of balance. called kinesthetic sense.
Receptors in the semicircular Receptors in the muscle tissues
canals and vestibular sacs of the
ear and joints
Works with cerebellum
Embodied
Cognition
Sensation and perception have to
work together to give us a complete
understanding of our surroundings,
thus each side works in a continuous
loop where we begin to think within
the body. This is known as embodied
cognition - the influence of bodily
sensations, gestures, and other
states on cognitive preferences and
judgments.
Consider the phenomenon of
synesthesia, where sensory
stimulation triggers more than
one sense. Have you seen the
TikToks of people who see
sounds, taste numbers, or hear
colors?
Miscellaneous
Franz Gall &
Phrenology
In the early 1800s, German physician
Franz Gall proposed that phrenology,
or the study of bumps on the skull,
could reveal a person’s underlying
brain size and provide insight into their
character and abilities. Though proved
false, it did lead to focusing on the
localization of function, or that certain
parts of the brain have specific
functions/roles.
These are a few of CB’s favorite things…
Parts of the neuron & function
Parts of the brain & function
Types of Neurotransmitters
Brain Scans
Neural transmission & reuptake
Stages of Sleep
Sleep Disorders
Sensory adaptation
Theories of Color Vision & Hearing
Vestibular vs Kinesthetic Sense
Transduction of sight and sound
Nightmare vs. Night Terror
An emotional dream - able to Affects the body very strongly: the
remember it heart starts pounding, breathing
Occur during REM-sleep - later in rate increases and the blood
the night. pressure arises.
Body is paralyzed - no movement. Unable to remember the event.
Able to move during the episode
Occur in the first 3 hours of sleep
Perfect and Imperfect Vision
If you have perfect vision, you
will have a perfectly spherical
eyeball where all images fall
perfectly on the retina.
Nearsighted/myopic people (those
who see things clearly up close,
but struggle with things farther
away) will have a longer eyeball
while farsighted/hyperopic people
(those who can clearly see things
from far away but struggle with
things up close) will have a taller
eyeball.
Color Blindness
About 1 person in 50 is “colorblind.” That
person is usually male, because the defect is
genetically sex linked. Most people with color-
deficient vision are not actually blind to all
colors. They simply lack functioning red- or
green-sensitive cones, or sometimes both.
Their vision—perhaps unknown to them,
because their lifelong vision seems normal—
is monochromatic (one-color) or dichromatic
(two-color) instead of trichromatic, making it
impossible to distinguish the red and green.
Dogs, too, lack receptors for the wavelengths
of red, giving them only limited, dichromatic
color vision.
Illusions
A visual illusion involves an apparently inexplicable
discrepancy between the appearance of a visual
stimulus and its physical reality.
Common illusions:
Müller-Lyer: illusion of line length that is distorted by
inward-turning or outward-turning corners on the
ends of the lines, causing lines of equal length to
appear to be different.
Ames Room: Due to the shape of the room-
trapezoid, the person standing to the right side of
the room appears much larger.
Moon Illusion: moon always appears larger on the
horizon than it does overhead
Ponzo Illusion: an optical illusion in which two
identical figures are made to appear of different
sizes because of the effect of perspective
Museum of Illusion

FCSAPP Developme
nt Adventure
Volley Principle
When high frequency sounds are
experienced too frequently for a
single neuron to adequately process
and fire for each sound event, the
organ of Corti combines the multiple
stimuli into a "volley" in order to
process the sounds. The volley
principle states that groups of
neurons of the auditory system
respond to a sound by firing action
potentials slightly out of phase with
one another so that when combined,
a greater frequency of sound can be
encoded and sent to the brain to be
analyzed.
 AP Psychology. AP Psychology
– AP Students | College Board.
(n.d.).
https://apstudents.collegeboard.
org/courses/ap-psychology
Myers, David G. and Nathan
DeWall. Exploring Psychology.
11th edition. 2019. New York:
Citations Worth.
Myers, David G. and Nathan
DeWall. Psychology. 12th
edition. 2018. New York: Worth.
Weiten, Wayne. Psychology:
Themes and Variations. 10th
edition. 2017. Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.