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