Sensation briefly refers to physiological arousal of a sense organ by the stimulus.

The sense organs are advance scouts in the sensory process, the nervous system provides the pathways and message runners, and the brain is the headquarters and the decision maker.

the minimum amount of physical energy required to produce a sensation The least amount of stimulus necessary to produce a response in a person 50 percent of the time.

It is the approximate point at which a stimulus becomes strong enough to produce a response in an individual.
Absolute threshold Difference threshold

Stimulus

Threshold

Vision: Candle flame seen at 30 miles away on a clear dark night

Hearing: Tick of a watch under quiet conditions at 20 feet.

Taste: 1 teaspoon of sugar in 2 gallons of water Smell: 1 drop of perfume in a three-room apartment Touch: Bee's wing falling on your cheek from 1 cm height.

It is the smallest changes in the stimuli that a person is able to detect, often referred to as the jnd or just noticeable difference.

Types of Sensitivity

Physical Stimulus

Sense Organs or Receptors

Area of Cerebral cortex

Types of Sensation

Visual

Light waves

Eyes; rods and cones

Occipital lobe

hue, brightness saturation

Auditory

Sound waves

Ears; hair cells In Organ of Corti

Temporal Lobe

Pitch Loudness Complexity

Olfactory

Gaseous Substance

Nose; hair cells None; mediated in the Olfactory in the lower epithelium brain centers

Types of Sensitivity Gustatory

Physical Stimulus Soluble substances

Sense Organs or Receptors Tongue; taste cells in taste buds

Area of Cerebral cortex Parietal lobe

Types of Sensation Salt, sour, sweet, bitter

Cutaneous

Mechanical or thermal situation

Change in position of body parts Change in rotary motion; Body position

Skin; free nerve endings

Parietal lobe

Pressure, pain, warmth or cold

Kinesthetic

Muscles, tendons and joints; nerve endings Ear; semicircular canals, vestibule

Parietal lobe

Movement of body parts

Equilibrium

Turning or spinning acceleration; deceleration

The organization of sensory input into meaningful experience. The functions of perception can be briefly summarized thus:

Perceiving serves the function of converting raw sensory input into useful information. Perception serves as an encoding process.

Attention is the readiness to perceive, a pre-perceptive set or expectancy based on ones interests and motivations, as well as the nature of stimuli which impinge upon us.

 Nature Location

Novelty

By nature, we may mean for example, whether the stimulus is visual and auditory, and whether it involves words or pictures, people or animals. The best location of a visual stimulus for attracting attention is directly in front of the eyes in the center of the page.

Most of us attend to anything that is novel or unusual. A stimulus becomes novel in contrast which is customary; a familiar item in a novel surrounding or a novel object in familiar surroundings is usually attention getting.

The immediate or long term interests of an individual and his various dominant motivational systems are clearly potent internal determinants of attention for him

According to Marx, one of the more interesting of the various measures of internal determinants o attention is the pupillary response. The size of the pupils of the eyes normally decreases in strong light, thereby protecting the retina, and increases in dimlight so as to permit more light to enter the eyes.

Figure-ground
We perceive a foreground object (figure) against a background (ground)

Animals may look like the background they inhabit as a way of destroying figureground distinction

A boundary between a figure and is ground. The contours that separate figure from ground also enable the individual to organize stimuli into patterns.

Other principles of organization

Proximity Similarity

Closure
Continuity

Occur because of misleading cues in the stimulus. Gives rise to false perceptions.

Both distance and direction can be accurately perceived by the sense of hearing alone. In fact, hearing without vision is more acute than it is with vision. Each of our senses probably becomes keener when it cannot depend on the help of other senses.

Loud, clear sounds seem to be nearby, and weak or indistinct sounds usually seem to be far away. If an object comes between the source of the sound and the receiver , the sound source will seem to be farther away than if there were no obstruction.

The listener is always making adaptive movement of the head and the body in the position more receptive to the cues of sound direction.

The concept of extra sensory perception implies a form of perception that does not involve the stimulation of any known sensory receptors. Telepathy Clairvoyance Precognition Psychokinesis

Refers to extraordinary perception such as

Clairvoyance awareness of an unknown object or event Telepathy knowledge of someone elses thoughts or feelings Precognition foreknowledge of future events Psychokinesis- is the ability to influence the movement of material bodies by the power of thought alone.

Research has been unable to conclusively demonstrate the existence of ESP