Chapter Two: Sensation and Perception

At the end of this chapter, you are expected to:

 explain meaning of sensation and perception

 compare and contrast sensation with perception
 describe factors that affect sensation and perception
 explain principles of sensation and perception

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What do you observe from the picture?

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 2.1.The meanings of sensation and perception

 Sensation is the process whereby stimulation of receptor cells

in the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and surface of the skin sends
nerve impulses to the brain.

 Sensation is therefore the process that detects the stimulus

from one‘s body or from the environment.

Eg. Color, brightness, the pitch of tone or a bitter taste are

examples of sensations.

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 Cont’d

 Perception is the process that organizes sensations into

meaningful patterns. It is the process whereby the brain
interprets sensations, giving them order and meaning.

 Thus, hearing sounds and seeing colors is largely a sensory

process, but forming a melody and detecting patterns and
shapes is largely a perceptual process.

 It is almost impossible to separate sensation from perception.

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2.2.The sensory laws: Sensory thresholds and sensory adaption

Sensory threshold is the minimum point of intensity a stimuli can

be detected.
Absolute threshold

Sensory threshold

Difference threshold

A. The absolute threshold(Limen)

The minimum amount of stimulation a person can detect is
called the absolute threshold or Limen.

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Table 3.1 Examples of absolute thresholds
Sense Threshold

1 Sight A candle flame at 30miles on a dark night

2 Hearing The tick of a watch 20 feet away in a quiet room.

3 Smell One drop of perfume diffused throughout a three

–room apartments
4 Test 1 tea spoon of sugar in 2 gallons of water

5 Touch A bee’s wing falling on the cheek from 1 cm

above.

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 Cont’d
 Because the absolute threshold for a particular sensory experience
varies, psychologists operationally define the absolute threshold as the
minimum level of stimulation that can be detected 50 percent of the
time when a stimulus is presented over and over again.

 Eg. if you were presented with a low intensity sound 30 times and
detected it 15 times, that level of intensity would be your absolute
threshold for that stimulus.

 In addition to intensity of the stimulus; the detection of a stimulus

depends on the physical and psychological state of the individual.

 One of the most important psychological factors is the response bias-

how ready the person is to report the presence of a particular stimulus.

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B.The difference threshold (just noticeable difference (jnd))
 The minimum amount of change that can be detected is called
difference threshold.
 Eg1, a cup of coffee would require a certain amount of additional
sugar before you could detect an increase in its sweetness.
 Eg2, you would have to increase the intensity of the sound from
your tape recorder a certain amount before you could detect a
change in its volume.

 Like the absolute threshold, the difference threshold for a

particular sensory experience varies from person to person and
from occasion to occasion.

 This difference in threshold is called the just noticeable difference

(jnd).
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Sensory Adaptation
 One possible reason is that if a stimulus remains constant in
intensity, you will gradually stop noticing it.

 The tendency of our sensory receptors to have decreasing

responsiveness to unchanging stimulus is called sensory adaptation.

 Eg. Once you have determined that the swimming pool water is cold,
it would serve little purpose to continue noticing the stimuli-
especially when more important change might be taking place
elsewhere in your surroundings.

 Of course, you will not adapt completely to extremely intense

sensations, such as severe pain or freezing cold.

 To ignore such stimuli some times might be harmful. 10

2.3.Perception

 Perception is a meaning making process.

 It helps you understand the major characteristics of the

perceptual process such as:

Selectivity of perception,
Form perception,
Depth perception,
Perceptual constancy,
Perceptual illusion.

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2.3.1 Selectivity of perception: Attention

 Attention is the term given to the perceptual process that

selects certain inputs for inclusion in your conscious
experience, or awareness, at any given time, ignoring
others.

 Selectivity of perception implies, among other things, that

our field of experience is divided into what is known as
“Focus” and “Margin.”

 Events or stimuli that you perceive clearly are the focus of

your experience and other items or stimuli that you perceive
dimly or vaguely are in the margin of your attention.

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Paying attention is in general a function of two factors

Factors external to the

perceiver Eg. size and intensity,
repetition, novelty (or newness),
and movement and brighter
stimuli
Paying
attention
Factors internal to the perceiver
Eg. Set or expectancy and
motives or needs

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 Cont’d
 Some of the external characteristics of objects that determine whether
you are going to attend them or not are size and intensity, repetition,
novelty (or newness), and movement.

 Other things being constant, bigger and brighter stimuli are more
likely to capture your attention than smaller and dimmer objects.

WHY ANNOUNCEMENTS AND

 That is

NOTICE ARE WRITTEN IN BIG AND

BLOCK LETTERS.
 In the same way, people who dress bright colored clothes tend to
capture your attention.
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2.3.2 Form perception

 The meaningful shapes or patterns or ideas that are made

perhaps out of meaningless and discrete or pieces and
bites of sensations refer to form perception.

 To perceive forms (meaningful shapes or patterns), you

need to distinguish a figure (an object) from its ground (or
its surrounding).

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A. Figure-Ground Perception

 To perceive forms (meaningful shapes or patterns), you need to

distinguish a figure (an object) from its ground (or its
surrounding).

 The ability to distinguish an object from its general background

is basic to all form perception.

 Gestalt psychologists stress that form perception is an active,

rather than a passive, process like selectivity of perception.

Figure Ground

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 Cont’d
 Pictures (figure) hang on a wall (ground), words (figure) are
seen on a page (ground), and melody (figure) stands out from
the repetitive chords in the musical background (ground).
 The pictures, words, and the melody are perceived as the figure,
while the wall, the page, and the chords are the ground.

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What helps us to separate the figure from the ground?

 You are able to separate forms from the general ground only
because you can perceive contours.

 Contours are formed whenever a marked difference occurs in

the brightness or color of the background.

 Contours give shape to the objects in our visual world because

they mark one object off from another or they mark an object
off from the general ground.

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B. Organization in form Perception

 When several objects are present in the visual field, we tend to

perceive them as organized into patterns or groupings.

 Gestalt psychologist said ―the whole is more than the sum of

its parts.

 This simply means that what is perceived has its own new
properties, properties that emerge from the organization,
which takes place.

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 Organization in perception partially explains our perception
of complex patterns as unitary forms, or objects.

 We see objects as objects only because grouping processes

operate in perception.

 Without perceptual organization, the various objects and

patterns we perceive-a face on a television screen, a car, a tree,
a book-would not “hang together” as objects or patterns,
they would merely be so many disconnected sensations-dots,
lines or marks.

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Laws of perceptual organization
A. Principle of Proximity or nearness-The laws of proximity
says that items which are close together in space or time tend to
be perceived as belonging together or forming an organized
group.

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B. Principle of Similarity
 According to this principle, things that are alike tend to be
grouped together.

C. Principle of Continuity
Continuation would suggest that we are more likely to perceive
this as two overlapping lines, rather than four lines meeting in the
center.

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D. Principle of Closure

Closure suggests that we will perceive a complete circle and

rectangle rather than a series of segments.

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 2.3.3.Depth perception
 Depth perception, seeing objects in three dimensions, enables
us to estimate their distance from us.
 At a glance, we estimate the distance of an oncoming car or the
height of a house.

 Visual-cliff Ele Gibson and Richard Walk devised this miniature cliff with a glass-
covered drop-off to determine whether crawling infants and newborn animals can
perceive depth.
 Infants are reluctant to venture onto the glass over the cliff.
 To Gibson and Walk, this suggested that mobile newborn animals come prepared to 25
Cues Used in Depth Perception.
The farther away an object is, the fewer details you can see. You can see small holes and the
rough texture of the rock in the foreground whereas the rocks in the background look much
smoother. The rock that is partly obscured is located behind the rock that obscures it. We use
these cues to aid us in depth perception.

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 Cont’d

Depth perception depends on the use binocular cues and monocular

cues
I. Binocular cues and monocular cues

There are two kinds of binocular cues: retinal disparity and

convergence.

Retinal disparity and convergence require the interaction of both eyes.

A. Retinal disparity is the degree of difference between the image of an

object that are focused on the two retinas.

To demonstrate retinal disparity for yourself, point a forefinger

vertically between your eyes.
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Look at the finger with one eye closed. Then look at it with the other closed. You will
notice that the background shifts as you view the scene with different views of the
same stimulus.
 Certain cells in visual cortex detect the degree of retinal disparity, which the brain
uses to estimate the distance of an object focused on the retinas.

Retinal disparity is greater when an object is near to the observer than

when it is farther away.
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 Cont’d
B. Convergence-is the degree to which the eyes turn inward to
focus on an object.
 As you can confirm for yourself, the closer the objects are the
greater the convergence of the eyes.

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 You should notice an increase in ocular muscle tension as your
finger approaches your nose.

 Not that convergence is associated with important everyday

activities.
NB
 For example, drinking alcohol impairs depth perception by
disrupting the normal convergence of the eyes and using a
computer terminal for hours induce eye fatigue caused by
continues convergence.

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 II. Monocular cues
Binocular cues require two eyes, whereas monocular cues require
only one. This means that even people who have lost sight in one
eye may still have good depth perception.
1. Accommodation, which is the change in the shape of the lens
that lets you focus the image of an object on the retina.

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 Prolonged accommodation can alter your depth perception.
For example, if you stare at a near object for a long time and
then look at a more distant object, the more distant object will
look farther away than it is.

 This is attributable to the brain‘s overcompensation for the

continuous accommodation of the lens while it was focused on
the near object.

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2. Motion parallax, the tendency to perceive ourselves as
passing objects faster when they are closer to us than when they
are farther away.

 You will notice this when you drive on a rural road.

 You perceive yourself passing nearby telephone poles faster

than you are passing a farmhouse.

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Pictorial cues

The remaining monocular cues are called pictorial cues because

artists use them to create depth in their drawings and paintings.

1. Interposition

If one object partially blocks our

view of another, we perceive it as
closer. The depth cues provided by
interposition make this an
impossible scene.

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Relative size- If two people are
about the same height and one
casts a smaller image on your
retina. You will perceive that
person as farther away.

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 Linear perspective- Linear perspective parallel lines, such as
railroad tracks, appear to converge with distance. The more
they converge, the greater their perceived distance.

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Elevation

 An object‘s elevation provides another cue to its distance.

Objects that are higher in your visual field seem to be farther
away. If you paint a picture, you create depth by placing more
distant objects higher on the Canvas(paintings).

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Shading patterns
Nearby objects reflect more light to our eyes. Thus, given two
identical objects, the dimmer one seems farther away. Shading,
too, produces a sense of depth consistent with our assumption
that light comes from above. Invert the illustration below and the
hollow in the bottom row will become a hill.

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 Texture gradient- affects depth perception because the nearer
an object, the more details we can make out and the farther an
object, the more details we can make out, and the farther an
object, the fewer details we can make out.
 When you look across a field, you can see every blade of grass
near you, but only an expanse of green far away from you.

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 Aerial perspective depends on the clarity of objects. Closer
objects seem clearer than more distant ones. A distant
mountain will look hazier than a near one.

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2.3.4.Perceptual Constancies
 The image of a given object focused on your retina may vary
in size, shape, and brightness. Yet you will continue to
perceive the object as stable in size, shape, and brightness
because of perceptual constancy.

 If you know the actual size of an object, size constancy

makes you interpret a change in its retinal size as a change in
its distance rather than a change in its size.

 Size constancy can be disrupted by alcohol.

 Disruption of size constancy might be one way that alcohol

intoxication promotes automobile accidents.
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Shape and Size Constancies

 Sometimes an object whose actual shape cannot change seems to

change shape with the angle of our view. More often, thanks to
shape constancy, we perceive the form of familiar objects, such as
the door, table as constant even while our retinal image of it
changes.

Perceiving shape Do the tops of these tables have different dimensions?

They appear to. But—believe it or not—they are identical With both tables,
we adjust our perceptions relative to our viewing angle.

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Objects Look Different Depending on the Perspective.
The pictures show the same two high-rise buildings in Boston from two different
perspectives. In (a) they look about the same size, as they in fact are. In (b), their
image on the retina makes them seem to be of different heights, and it is only
through further processing that we can pinpoint they are the same size.
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Here, you see a rectangular door and door
frame, showing the door as closed, slightly
opened, more fully opened, or wide open. Of
course, the door does not appear to be a
different shape in each panel. Indeed, it
would be odd if you perceived a door to be
changing shapes as you opened it. Yet, the
shape of the image of the door sensed by
your retinas does change as you open the
door. If you look at the figure, you will see
that the drawn shape of the door is different
in each panel.

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 Brightness Constancies
 Though the amount of light reflected from a given object can
vary, we perceive the object as having a constant brightness,
this is called brightness constancy.

Relative luminance Squares A and B are identical in color,

believe it or not. (If you don’t believe me, photocopy the
illustration, cut out the squares, and compare.) But we
perceive B as lighter, thanks to its surrounding context.
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2.3.5.Perceptual Illusion
A. Visual illusions provide clues to the processes involved in
normal visual perception. For example, from ancient times to
modern times, people have been mystified by the moon illusion
illustrated in Figure in which the moon appears larger when it is
at the horizon than when it is overhead. This is an illusion
because the moon is the same distance from us at the horizon as
when it is overhead.

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B. Ponzo Illusion

A quite different additional 'size' illusion is yielded by the

Ponzo diagram. It begins as an angular size illusion.

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 C. Mueller-Lyer illusion
 The line segment in the bottom arrow looks longer to us than the
one on the top, even though they are both actually the same
length.

Figure 5.3 In the Müller-Lyer illusion, lines appear to be different lengths although they are
identical. (a) Arrows at the ends of lines may make the line on the right appear longer,
although the lines are the same length. (b) When applied to a three-dimensional image, the
line on the right again may appear longer although both black lines are the same length.
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Extra sensory perception

 In general, perception is the act of knowing through sensation.

But, some people appear to have an ability to know other people,
objects, and events without any sensory contact an experience
called extra sensory perception (ESP) or paranormal ability.

 Have you ever heard or experienced such phenomena? Do

you believe it is true? Do you think psychologists and
scientists believe in ESP? Why?

////////////End of chapter 2////////////////

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