The concept of sensation and perception explains how humans interact with the outside world. But what is sensation and perception? Sensation and perception are two separate processes, but they are two sides of the same coin. In sensation and perception, sensory stimuli are taken from the environment and sent to the brain.
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Sensation is the first step to creating perceptions about the outside world. Through sensation, humans can turn sensory inputs from the environment into signals understood by the brain. Once the signals are in the brain, then perception can occur.
What is sensation? Sensation is the introduction to sensation and perception. Humans use sensory organs (eyes, nose, skin, ears, and tongue) to see, smell, feel, listen, and taste.
Sensation occurs when sensory receptors detect physical sensory stimuli from the environment and encode the input into the nervous system. Within the main sensory organs are smaller, specialized sensory organs. For example, the ear has different sensory organs that are vital in sound and balance.
How is sensation and perception related? Perception takes sensations and adds another step: noticing the sensations. Perception involves the organization, interpretation, and conscious experience of sensations. The brain creates meaning from the electrical impulse sent via nervous system.
For example, how are images perceived? Let's start with sensation and end with perception:
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Sensation and perception examples include bottom-up and top-down processing.
Bottom-up processing starts at the sensory organs. Signals are sent to the brain through transduction and the nervous system. Top-down processing only involves the brain. Sensory organs are not involved in top-down processing. Perceptual schemas and retinol blind spot are examples of top-down processing.
The previous example of a sound travelling through the ear to the brain is an example of bottom-up processing.
Sensation uses sensory organs to send messages about environmental stimuli to the brain, where perception takes place. Sensation is crucial for bottom-up processing.
Humans use sensations to perceive the outside world. For example, a sensory organ like the eye captures a visual stimuli. The ear captures an auditory stimuli.
The path from sensation to perception is many steps, but it still takes less than a microsecond for a stimuli to become a conscious thought. This is thanks to the lightning-fast nervous system.
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Without the nervous system, sensation and perception would be impossible. Through a process called transduction, sensory inputs are turned into electrical signals and transmitted to the brain.
For example, let us begin with a sensory organ: the ear. Sound enters the ear canal in the form of soundwaves and passes to the middle ear. In the middle ear, tiny bones next to eardrum vibrate. Louder sounds cause greater vibration, as do higher pitches.
The vibration is passed to the inner ear. Tiny hairs in the inner ear called the cochlea pick up the vibration. The sensory receptors on cochlea cells use transduction to convert vibrations into electrical impulses. These signals are then sent to the brain through nerves in the nervous system.
Interestingly, the cochlea hair cells can process and send signals to both the vestibular nerve and the cochlea nerve. The vestibular nerve sends the signal to the balance center of the brain, while the cochlea nerve sends the signal to the vision center of the brain.
Once the signal is received, the brain can process that information through perception.
Sensory organs are an important part of sensation. Other examples of specific sensory organs and receptors include:
Perceptions are used in top-down processing.
Filling in blind spots is an example of top-down processing when bottom-up processing is unavailable. The optic nerve, which connects the eye and the brain, is a blind spot.
The optic nerve has no photoreceptors that capture light, so the eye cannot process images to send to the brain. With no available picture, the brain creates an image. This image is based on the brain's perception of what should be there.
A test can be conducted to find the blind spot.
As the paper gets closer, the dot will momentarily disappear. This test exhibits the blind spot in the left eye. To find the blind spot in the right eye, focus on the dot with the right eye.
A schema is a perceptual framework people use to make sense of the world. A schema is essentially a pre-existing pattern.
Humans draw on both sensation (input from sensory organs) and learned knowledge about the world. Schemas help organize information through grouping, like gestalt grouping. Schemas inform perceptions and choices about the people and objects in life.
Gestalt grouping is how humans tend to group objects together. The proposed laws of grouping are:
Objects or images that are similar in size, shape, color, and/or proximity will be considered as group or whole. In an incomplete image, humans tend to fill in gaps. A simple example of gestalt grouping is grouping football teams based on the colors they wear.
Perceptual adaptation occurs when people adapt to the surrounding stimuli.
Psychologist Gustav Fechner wondered at what point humans become aware of a sensation. He introduced the study of psychophysics to explain how external stimuli affect people.
Psychologists maintain two main thresholds for sensation and perception. The absolute threshold and the difference threshold are two different ways to measure how humans perceive stimuli.
Ernst Weber was interested in the difference threshold. He developed a principal, Weber's Law, which states that the noticeable difference of a stimulus is proportional to the original intensity of the stimulus. This is also called the just noticeable difference.
For example, if the radio is quiet, turning five notches up will be noticeable. If the radio is already loud, turning five notches up won't make as much of a difference. Going from quiet to loud is more noticeable than going from loud to louder.
Tests that measure sensitivity to stimuli are called signal detection analysis. More accurate perception of stimuli indicates a higher sensitivity.
Subliminal advertising, such as images that flash by too quickly to see or sounds that play too low to hear, was long thought to have an unconscious effect on human decision-making. However, subliminal advertising has been shown to have a minimal effect on one's thinking. This suggests that stimuli must be consciously perceived to have effect on decision-making.
Monocular depth cues are referred as depth perception.
Another perceptual schema humans master in childhood is constancy.
The stroboscopic effect is an example of perceived motion, where still images move quickly and create the illusion of motion. This is how the first films were made.
What is the difference between sensation and perception?
Sensation takes information from the outside world (stimulus). Pathways bring stimuli into the body. In the brain, this information is perceived.
A key difference between sensation and perception is where sensation and perception processes occur in the bottom-up processing pathway.
In bottom-up processing, which includes sensory input, we can describe the pathway as follows:
Environmental stimuli -> sensory organ -> sensory receptor -> transduction -> nerves -> brain -> perception.
Seen in the pathway, perception occurs after a signal reaches the brain. But sensation is more of a continuum. Sensation begins with the sensory organ and merges with perception in the brain.
All humans get the same sensory information input. However, every human has a unique brain. Therefore, different humans perceive the same sensations in different ways. Sensations are the same, but perceptions differ.
What is sensation and perception? Sensation is input about the physical world obtained by our sensory receptors and sent to the brain through the nervous system. Perception is the process by which the brain selects, organizes, and interprets these sensations.
We can perceive the world through bottom-up processing, which uses sensation to create perceptions, or top-down processing, which uses perceptions and knowledge to fill in the gaps when sensations are not available.
Gustav Fechner created a new field of study called psychophysics, which explored how external stimuli affect humans. His studies became the basis for the study of sensation and perception, and paved the way for developing the ideas of absolute threshold and difference threshold.
Ernst Weber was interested in the difference threshold. He developed a principal, Weber's Law, which states that the noticeable difference of a stimulus is proportional to the original intensity of the stimulus. This is also called the just noticeable difference. For example, an increase in stimulus strength is more noticeable if the original strength of the stimulus is low.
Marketers used to believe that stimuli under the detection threshold could affect consumers and developed subliminal advertising. However, researchers have found that subliminal advertising has a minimal effect on one's thinking.
The main difference between sensation and perception is that sensation is the process of sensing our surroundings using the five senses, while perception is the process of interpreting the acquired sensations.
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We use sensation and perception to understand the world around us. Without our senses, and the way we understand those senses (perception), we would be unable to interact with the world.
An example of sensation would be a sensory organ such as the each using specialized sensory receptors and transduction to turn a sensory input such as a soundwave into a signal that can be understood by the brain. An example of perception would be interpreting that sensory signal, such as becoming alarmed if you hear somebody call "help!"
In essence, sensation is the physical detection of a stimulus using the five senses, while perception is the conscious detection and interpretation of a stimulus. Sensation is taking information from the outside world and bringing it in. All humans get the same sensory information. But we all perceive that info differently.
Yes. Sensation can occur before we perceive that sensation. For example, our sensory organs can sense a sound before we consciously interpret that sound.
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