Chapter 8 Sensation and Perception
Chapter 8 Sensation and Perception
Chapter 8 Sensation and Perception
Sensation and
Perception
Chapter 8: Sensation and Perception
Topics Covered Today - Tuesday December 5
○ Example: The flip of a switch (stimuli) is causing a change in the sensation of sight. (Your senses
detect the physical change.)
Examples:
Vision: seeing a candle flame 30 miles Taste: tasting 1 teaspoon of sugar
away on a clear night. dissolved in 2 gallons of water.
Hear: hearing a watch ticking 20 feet away. Smell: smelling 1 drop of perfume in a
3-room house.
Example:
● What happens when you leave a dark movie theatre during the day?
● When its still bright day light outsides, your eyes are sensitive as they are
adjusted to the dark of the movie theatre, so you will be squinting/shielding
your eyes.
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Signal-Detection Theory
● The study of - people’s tendencies to make correct judgments in detecting the
presence of stimuli.
***Listening for your name to be called in a coffee shop - Video Example Next Slide
Volunteer for the next slide - Say the COLOR you see.
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That was easy!
Volunteer for the next slide - Say the COLOR, not the word!
- Now you must consider only one part of the stimuli presented at a time.
Attentive Process
Chapter 8: Sensation and Perception Continued…
Topics Covered Today - Wednesday December 6
- The Senses
- The Body Senses
- Vision (Light, color deficiency, binocular fusion, near/farsightedness)
- Hearing (The pathway of sound, deafness)
- Smell and Taste (Olfactory nerve)
- The Skin Senses (Perceptions of pain)
The Body Senses
● If you had to get rid of one sense which would it be and why?
Vision
Vision is the MOST studied of all the senses.
● Light enters through the PUPIL and reaches the LENS (which is a flexible
structure) that focuses light on the RETINA.
○ The retina contains 2 types of photoreceptors calls the RODS and CONES.
● The RODS and CONES then turn the light into neural impulses which travel to
the OPTIC NERVE to the brain.
● The combination of the two images into one is called BINOCULAR FUSION
Some of us are born with perfect shaped eyeballs - they have almost perfect vision.
● Shut your RIGHT eye and look directly at the with your LEFT eye.
● Bringing the diagram slowly toward your face, the will disappear and then
reappear.
Hearing
● Hearing depends on vibrations of the air, called SOUND WAVES.
● These sound waves pass through various bones until they reach
the inner ear.
● The hair cells in the ear change sound vibrations into neural
signals that travel through the AUDITORY NERVE to the brain.
● LOUDNESS - determined by the amplitude/height of sound waves.
● Sound is measured in DECIBELS
○ Humans hear from 0-140 decibels
○ Anything over 85 decibels is harmful and WILL damage hearing.
● Sensorineural Deafness - occurs from damage to the cochlea, the hair cells, or
auditory neurons.
○ May be able to be helped with a cochlear implant.
Smell and Taste
Smell and Taste are known as the chemical senses because their receptors are
sensitive to chemical molecules rather than to light energy or sound waves.
- Perception (Video)
- Principles of Perceptual Organization
- Gestalt Patterns
- Figure-Ground Perception
- Perceptual Inference
- Learning to Perceive (Subliminal Messages Video)
- Depth Perception
- Constancy
Perception
Perception allows us to confront changes in our environment.
● Our brains receive information from the 5 senses, and ORGANIZES and
INTERPRETS it into meaningful experiences (unconsciously).
V
V
V V We see a star
instead of 5 V’s
The experience that comes from organizing bits and pieces of information into
meaningful wholes.
Gestalt principles helps us explain how we group our sensations and fill in gaps
to make sense of our world.
● Example - In music, you tend to group notes based on their closeness to each
other in time - so you hear melodies, not single notes.
● When you distinguish an airplane from the sky in which it’s flying, you
When our brains “fill in the gaps” on what is missing from sensory stimuli.
● Example: You hear a dog barking, and you can infer that it is a dog and not a
cat.
absolute threshold so there is less than a 50% chance that they will be perceived.
advertising.
What messages did you notice the host put in the video?
Depth Perception
The ability to recognize distances and three dimensionality.
This helps us see the door as a rectangle as it opens - because of this, we may
think the red outlines are also rectangle.
Chapter 8: Sensation and Perception Continued…
Topics Covered Today - Friday December 8
- Illusions
Illusions
● Illusions are INCORRECT perceptions.
● They are created when perceptual cues are distorted so that our brains can
not correctly interpret space, size, and depth cues.
Final Project Time!!!
PROS CONS
Group project - less work for you Present in front of the class