1. Sensation and Perception
Sensation: your window to the world
Perception: interpreting what comes
in your window.
2. 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.
3. 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
4. Perception: how we select, organize, and interpret sensations.
An active process that imposes some organization on
the meaningless sensations.
5. Perception: Top-Down Processing-analysis based on experience and
expectation (starts with the brain)
Sensation: Bottom-up Processing-analysis that starts with the senses
6. Perception
Our brains process information
and form schemas so that different
patterns of information seem
distorted.
7. 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.
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