Intro
Transcript of Intro
Sensation and Perception
Sensation: your window to the world
Perception: interpreting what comes in your window.
The Basics• We do not actually experience the world
directly, but instead we experience it through a series of “filters” we call senses.
• The study of these sense and their effect on our behavior is called sensory psychology.
SENSATION: how we detect physical
energy from the environment and encode it
as neural energy.
Sensation involves transducers-specialized receptor cells.
Transduction – converting stimuli into neural impulses
Perception: how we select, organize, and interpret sensations.
An active process that imposes some organization on
the meaningless sensations.
Sensation: Bottom-up Processing-analysis that starts with the senses
Perception: Top-Down Processing-analysis based on experience and
expectation (starts with the brain)
Perception
Our brains process information
and form schemas so that different
patterns of information seem
distorted.
Sensation and Perception• Perception is essentially an interpretation and
elaboration of sensation. Therefore, sensation refers to the initial steps in the processing of a stimulus.
These
pictures
look
fairly
similar
The True Picture