Sensation and perception are two topics that are old but still important to our psychology. Everyone has senses like hearing, sight, and taste that enable them to live in the world. The process of our senses gathering information and sending it to the brain is called sensation. In other words, sensation can be described as the physical process in which an individual’s sensory organs respond to external stimuli (Matlin, 1988). For instance, sensation occurs when one hears a vehicle horn from a distance. In sensation, the sense organs are engaged in converting one energy form to another, a process called transduction. The form of energy that the brain can understand is called electrical stimulation. Therefore, physical energy, like sound, is converted to electrical stimulation through transduction. The brain receives these electrical signals, makes sense of it all and we respond by appreciating the complex works we live in. The psychological process through which the brain makes sense of the external stimuli is called perception. Perception is when one identifies a particular unusual smell or music that reminds of a specific event.
Many principles affect the working of our sensory organs. The interaction between these principles is what will help us understand the connection between perception and sensation. The principles lie in the world of sensation. I will first discuss these principles and then show how they are related to perception. The first principle is the absolute threshold which is the minimum level of stimulation for one to detect a certain stimulus (Levine and Shefner, 1991). Every sensory organ can detect a certain amount of stimulus. For this reason, it is possible to smell somebody’s perfume when you are close to them and not when you’re somewhat far from them. An absolute threshold is measured by signal detection. The measurement involves presenting a participant with varying intensities of stimuli to find the stimuli level that the person can detect stimulation reliably. Studying signal detection has enabled humans to understand how remarkable our senses are.
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A second principle is the differential threshold, which is the ability of one to differentiate between two different stimuli of varying intensities. Studying the differential threshold of different stimuli has also been done through signal detection, which is similar to the method used in absolute threshold detection (Merfeld, 2006). The method uses the phenomenon that the bigger the stimuli, the more significant the differences in stimuli required to be noticed. The phenomenon is contained in Weber’s Law.
The way one’s brain processes things are influenced by the person’s experiences. Let’s consider the sense of tasting food. Everyone has ever tasted food they like and food they did not like. Also, there is music that one would enjoy but there are others that you cannot even stand. But for all these types, there was a first time that you tasted or heard. Bottom-up processing is the means through which these stimuli are processed. Hence, the perception of the food or music is build up from individual pieces. Other times, this perception (processing new stimuli) comes from stimuli that one has experienced in the past, a process called top-down processing. An illustration of these two processing methods is when reading the sentence ‘I love wearing clothes that are dull colored.’ A person reading this might not have noticed the second ‘are’ because they were reading it from an approach that is top-down. The brain knows that the second ‘are’ doesn’t make sense and they don’t expect it to be there. Therefore, there is a tendency of skipping it. On the other hand, a reader who is just beginning is careful with each word and therefore might not skip the second one (Merfeld, 2006). The beginner is reading word for word, using the bottom-up approach (since there is no experience.
Another relationship that exists between perception and sensation is sensory adaptation (Stein and Meredith, 1993). Sometimes when there is a sensory stimulus we experience that doesn’t change, we do not pay attention to it. For this reason, we usually don’t feel the weight of our clothes on us. An unchanging and constant stimulus makes people develop sensory adaptation during which we develop less sensitivity to that stimulus. For instance, when the radio of a car is left on at night when the owners have gone to sleep. The radio was listened with the same volume that night on the way home. The next morning when the car is started, the owner might be startled at how the volume was loud, yet the previous night it didn’t seem that loud. An explanation to this is that the previous night the owner had adapted to the constant radio volume stimulus. Some hours without that same stimulus causes a steadily decreasing sensitivity to the stimulus, making the volume that was initially reasonable is loud. Change in the stimulus made the owner no longer adapted to the original one.
In conclusion, perception and sensation are crucial to humans. Perception cannot work alone without sensation. Also, sensation cannot work without people perceiving the world around them. Therefore, it is vital for us to understand both topics and how they relate to understanding how other psychological processes work.
References
Matlin, M. W. (1988). Sensation and perception : Allyn & Bacon.
Levine, M. W., & Shefner, J. M. (1991). Fundamentals of sensation and perception.
Merfeld, D. M. (2006). Sensation & perception (pp. 242-245). Sunderland, MA: Sinauer.
Stein, B. E., & Meredith, M. A. (1993). The merging of the senses . The MIT Press.
