Sensation and Perception Flashcards
What is Sensation?
Registering Stimulation of Senses
What is Perception?
Processing and interpreting sensory information
What is Cognition?
Using perceived information to learn, classify and comprehend
Fundamental Concepts
Sight: Electromagnetic Energy - Photoreceptors - Primary Visual Cortex
Taste: Chemical Composition - Chemoreceptors - Gustatory Cortex
Smell: Chemical Composition - chemoreceptors - olfactory cortex
Hearing: Air pressure waves - mechanoreceptors - auditory cortex
Touch: Tissue Distortion - Mechanoreceptors and Thermoreceptors - somatosensory cortex
Gravity acceleration - mechanoreceptors - temporal cortex
Sense organ - sensory pathways - brain
Stimulis - Receptors - intermediate neurons - thalamus: neuron mass in the middle of the brain - recieveing area in cortex ( primary visual cortex - Seconrary cortex - Higher cortex
Bottom-up Processing
Perception starts with physical characteristics of stimulus and basic sensory processes- Gibson: Direct perception: environment contains sufficient cues (texture- depth)
Top- Down processing
The perceiver constructs their understanding of external stimuli based on their past experience and knowledge
How do we investigate Sensation and Perception
Staining Single-cel Recordings (electrophysiology) fMRI Lesion Studies Optical imaging ERP/ EEG Psychophysics Illusions and Introspection Computational Modelling
Lesion Studies
Animal:
by knife
by neurotoxins
Ethical issues
TMS - vitrual lesions : Pulses of magnetic energy disrupt activity in a small part of the brain for a short period
Psychophysics
Quantifying the relationship between physical stimuli and sensation and perception
Threshold : one to another
Absolute threshold: smallest needed for detection
Differential Threshold: smallest difference that can be detected.
