Essentials of Understanding Psychology 9 th Edition By Robert Feldman PowerPoints by Kimberly...

Essentials of Essentials of Understanding PsychologyUnderstanding Psychology

9th Edition

By Robert Feldman

PowerPoints by Kimberly Foreman

Revised for 9th Ed by Cathleen Hunt

Copyright McGraw-Hill, Inc. 2011

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Chapter 3:Chapter 3:Sensation and PerceptionSensation and Perception


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MODULE 8: Sensing the World Around Us

• What is sensation, and how do psychologists study it?

• What is the relationship between a physical stimulus and the kinds of sensory responses that result from it?


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MODULE 8:Sensing the World Around Us

• Sensation– Activation of the sense organs by a source of physical energy

• Perception– Sorting out, interpretation, analysis, and integration of stimuli

carried out by the sense organs and brain


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MODULE 8:Sensing the World Around Us

• Stimulus– Any passing source of physical energy that produces a response

in a sense organ

• Psychophysics– Study of the relationship between the physical aspects of

stimuli and our psychological experience of them


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Absolute Thresholds: Detecting What’s Out There

• Absolute Threshold– Smallest intensity of a stimulus that must be present for it to be

detected


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Difference Thresholds: Noticing Distinctions Between Stimuli

• Difference Threshold– Smallest level of added (or reduced) stimulation required to

sense that a change in stimulation has occurred • Just noticeable difference

• Weber’s law

– Just noticeable difference is a constant proportion of the intensity of an initial stimulus


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Sensory Adaptation:Turning Down Our Responses

• Adaptation– An adjustment in sensory capacity after prolonged exposure to

unchanging stimuli


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MODULE 9: Vision: Shedding Light on the Eye

• What basic processes underlie the sense of vision?

• How do we see colors?


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Basic Cells of the Eye


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Illuminating the Structure of the Eye

• Cornea– Protects eye and refracts light

• Pupil– Opening depends on amount of light in environment

• Iris– Colored part of eye

• Lens– Accommodation


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• Reaching the Retina– Light is converted to electrical impulses for transmission to the

brain• Rods

– Receptor cells sensitive to light

• Cones

– Cone-shaped; responsible for sharp focus and color perception

– Concentrated in the fovea


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• Sending the Message from the Eye to the Brain– Optic nerve

• Ganglion cells

• Blind spot

• Optic chiasm


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• Processing the Visual Message– Takes place in the visual cortex of the brain

• Feature detection


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Color Vision and Color Blindness:The Seven-Million-Color Spectrum

• Explaining Color Vision– Trichromatic theory of color vision

• Suggests that there are three kinds of cones in the retina

– Blue-violet colors

– Green colors

– Yellow-red colors

» Not successful at explaining afterimages


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Color Vision and Color Blindness:The Seven-Million-Color Spectrum

• Opponent-process theory of color vision– Receptor cells are linked in pairs, working in opposition to each

other• Blue-yellow

• Red-green

• Black-white

– Explains afterimages


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MODULE 10: Hearing and the Other Senses

• What role does the ear play in the senses of sound, motion, and balance?

• How do smell and taste function?

• What are the skin senses, and how do they relate to the experience of pain?


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The Ear


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Sensing Sound

• Sound– Movement of air molecules brought about by a source of

vibration

• Eardrum– Vibrates when sound waves hit it

– Middle ear• Hammer, anvil, stirrup


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Sensing Sound

• Inner Ear– Changes sound vibrations into a form in which they can be

transmitted to the brain• Cochlea

– Filled with fluid and vibrates in response to sound

• Basilar membrane

– Dividing cochlea into an upper chamber and lower chamber

– Covered with hair cells


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Sensing Sound

• The Physical Aspects of Sound– Frequency

• Number of wave cycles that occur in a second

– Pitch

– Amplitude• Spread between the up-and-down peaks and valleys of air pressure in a

sound wave as it travels through the air

– Decibels


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Sensing Sound

• Sorting Out Theories of Sound– Place Theory of Hearing

• States that different areas of the basilar membrane respond to different frequencies

– Frequency Theory of Hearing• Suggests that the entire basilar membrane acts like a microphone,

vibrating as a whole in response to a sound


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Sensing SoundBalance: The Ups and Downs of Life

• Vestibular System– Semicircular canals

• Main structure of vestibular system

• Three tubes containing fluid that sloshes through them when the head moves, signaling rotational or angular movement to the brain

– Otoliths• Sense forward, backward, or up-and-down motion, as well as the pull of

gravity


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Smell

• Olfaction – Sense of smell is sparked when the molecules of a substance

enter the nasal passages • Olfactory cells

– Pheromones


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Taste

• Gustation– Taste qualities

• Sweet

• Sour

• Salty

• Bitter

• “Umami”

– Taste Buds• Supertasters

• Nontasters


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The Skin Senses:Touch, Pressure, Temperature, and Pain

• Substance P

• Gate-control Theory of Pain– Particular nerve receptors in the spinal cord lead to specific

areas of the brain related to pain • Acupuncture


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Managing Pain

• Medication• Nerve and brain stimulation• Light therapy• Hypnosis• Biofeedback and relaxation techniques• Surgery• Cognitive restructuring


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How Our Senses Interact

• Synesthesia• Multimodal perception

– Brain collects the information from the individual sensory systems and integrates and coordinates it


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MODULE 11: Perceptual Organization: Constructing Our View of the World

• What principles underlie our organization of the visual world and allow us to make sense of our environment?

• How are we able to perceive the world in three dimensions when our retinas are capable of sensing only two-dimensional images?


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MODULE 11: Perceptual Organization: Constructing Our View of the World

• What clues do visual illusions give us about our understanding of general perceptual mechanisms?


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The Gestalt Laws of Organization

• Series of principles that focus on the ways we organize bits and pieces of information into meaningful wholes– gestalts


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Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processing

• Top-Down Processing– Perception is guided by higher-level knowledge, experience,

expectations, and motivations

• Bottom-Up Processing– Consists of the progression of recognizing and processing

information from individual components of a stimulus and moving to the perception of the whole


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Top-Down Processing


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Depth Perception

• Ability to view the world in three dimensions and to perceive distance– Largely due to the fact that we have two eyes

• Binocular disparity

• Monocular cues

– Motion parallax

– Relative size

– Texture gradient

– Linear perspective


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Perceptual Constancy

• Phenomenon in which physical objects are perceived as unvarying and consistent despite changes in their appearance or in the physical environment


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Motion Perception:As the World Turns

• Cues about perception of motion– The movement of an object across the retina is typically

perceived relative to some stable, unmoving background

– Movement of images across the retina

– We factor in information about our own head and eye movements, along with information about changes in the retinal image

– Apparent movement


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Perceptual Illusions:The Deceptions of Perceptions

• Visual Illusions– Physical stimuli that consistently produce errors in perception

• Muller-Lyer illusion


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Culture and Perception

• Cultural differences are reflected in depth perception– Zulu vs. Westerner perspectives


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Subliminal Perception

• Perception of messages about which we have no awareness– Called priming

• Written word

• Sound

• Smell


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Extrasensory Perception (ESP)

• Perception that does not involve our known senses– Most psychologists reject the existence of ESP, asserting that

there is no sound documentation of the phenomenon

– Psychological Bulletin• “Anomalous process of information transfer” or psi


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