SENSATION AND PERCEPTION

Everything we experience comes to us by means of our sense organs. These may be thought of as
receiving stations for stimuli which come from outside and from within our body. Human beings and other
higher animals are distinguished by the fact that the sense organs are highly specialized for receiving
specific kinds of stimuli. We have eyes for seeing, ears for hearing, the tongue for taste. In the most-simple
forms of animal life such as the one-celled amoeba, there is no differentiation as regards sense organs. The
whole body is equally sensitive to heat, to cold, to pressure, and light.

A sense organ, sometimes referred to as a receptor, is a specialized part of the body which is
selectively sensitive to some types of changes in its environment and not to others. For example, the eye is a
receptor for sensations of light waves but is impervious to sound stimuli. To a deaf individual whose sense
of hearing is totally impaired, it would make no difference whether you held a gentle ringing alarm clock
next to his ear.

A stimulus is any kind of mechanical, physical, or chemical change that acts upon a sense organ. The
important feature is the element of ‘change’. In applied psychology, we make maximum use of this idea
when we want to hold an individual’s attention. The advertiser, the teacher, the actor, and the engineer. For
example, employ this principle continuously. The behavioral reaction brought forth by a stimulus is termed a
response. In effect, every human response is preceded by a stimulus. It has been traditional to speak of
man’s five senses- seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting.

THE SENSE OF SIGHT

Vision is probably the most complicated of our sensory functions. The eyes are the sense organs of
sight. They are generally likened to a camera in the way they operate.

How we see – Light waves from an object enter the eye through pupil and pass through the lens. The
focus on the retina which is photographic back plate of the eye or the true receptor of visual stimuli. The
optic nerve attaches to the retina and serve as a medium for carrying the visual impulses to the brain.

THE SENSE OF HEARING

In several ways our auditory sense has much in common with our visual sense. Together, sight and
hearing are the primary mechanisms for bringing to us experiences from the outside. They are sometimes
classed as the distance senses because they make possible a judgement of the relative by wave movements in
the atmosphere. Thus, we speak of light waves and sound waves. Vision and hearing are obviously of the
greatest importance in bringing us into contact with the pleasures of aesthetic experience.
HOW WE HEAR

Hearing occurs when sound acts as a stimulus to the auditory sense. Sound consists of alternate
waves of condensation and rarefaction in the form of vibrations in the air. This is what the physicist calls
sound waves. When the sound waves strike the tympanic membrane of the human ear, we experience sound
in the psychological sense. In structure and function the ear is a highly complex organ. We recognize three
major parts of the ear – the outer, middle, and inner ear acts as a sort of sound transformer while the inner
ear contains the sensitive receptors.

THE FEELING SENSES

In the skin, where formerly only the sense of touch was thought to prevail, we now distinguish four
individual senses –touch or pressure, pain, warmth and cold. Receptors for these sensations are not limited
to the skin. Internal organs, to a much lesser degree, also respond to sensations of touch, pain and
temperature. You can accept the psychologists’ findings or explore them for yourself. By way,
generalization they tell us that different parts of the body have different degrees of sensitivity for the various
stimuli. Some parts are more responsive to touch, others to pain, some to heat and some to cold.

SENSE OF BALANCE

When you begin to fall and catch yourself in time, you are to say, ‘I almost lost my balance’. The
normal ability to maintain an upright position and a ‘sense of balance’ is controlled by a delicate sensory
mechanism called the semicircular canals. There are three semicircular canals about the diameter of a
pinhead in size, which are bent like pretzels and arranged in three perpendicular planes corresponding to the
back, side and top of the head. The canals are filled with a lymph-like fluid and contain hair cells attached to
nerve endings as were found in the cochlea. It is believed that movements of the head which set the fluids in
motion, stimulate the hair cells and thus register a sensation of change in position.

The position and movements of the head control the body position in space. Anyone learning to drive
or do acrobatics soon learns to take advantage of this fact. Overstimulation of the semicircular canals causes
dizziness and a loss of balance. Every youngster soon learns that of he spins himself around in circles, when
he stops, he will feel that his surroundings are still spinning.

PERCEPTION

Perception versus Sensation. Psychologically, a fine discrimination is made between the processes
of sensation and perception.

Sensation, we have said, is the act of receiving a stimulus by a sense argan. Perception, the act of
interpreting a stimulus registered in the brain by one or more sense mechanism.
 Sensation Without Perception. Instances of pure sensation in human experiences are rare. If you
hear a strange noise, no matter how unusual, you immediately associate it with something familiar. If you
see a completely strange and foreign object, you unconsciously attempt to relate it to some form or shape
you have seen before.

What we perceive at any given time, therefore, will depend not only on the nature of the actual
stimulus, but also on the background or setting in which it exists — our own previous sensory experiences,
our feeling of the moment, our general prejudices, desires, needs, attitudes and goals.

The Gestalt Concept of Perception; The Gestalt adherents point out that in our perceptions we are
prone to organize stimuli along the lines of certain natural tendencies which might be related to an
organizing and grouping function in the brain. There have been classified descriptively as factors of four
patterning tendencies – (1) similarity, (2) proximity, (3) continuity, and (4) closure,

Similarity: Items of the same size, shape, or quality are more likely to be viewed as a group or
pattern than dissimilar elements. There is a strong tendency to see four alternating groups of double rows
because of our inclination to unite the similar x’s and o’s even though the rows are evenly spaced. We set
off in our mind’s eye images of planted fields of corn, potatoes, rows of fruit trees in an orchard and other
areas of patchwork.

Proximity: Items that are close together tend to be grouped in our perceptions. We see four groups of
three letters each. Even though they are meaningless in this form, we see them as dis/abl/est/ish/.

Continuity: In viewing a pattern such as two factors are prevalent. We see the dots as straight lines
and not as separate dots. This is called the factor of continuity and illustrates our natural opposition to break
the continuous flow of a line, pattern or design in our perceptual awareness.

Closure: If we look at the geometrical shapes, we see them as a triangle, square, and circle. Although
they are not complete, there exists a strong inclination to perceive them as unified wholes. This is referred to
as the phenomenon of closure in perception. It might best be described as an organizing tendency to
complete an incomplete pattern.

In conclusion, Sensation and Perception are intricately linked processes that shape our experience of
the world. Sensation involves the initial detection of stimuli through our sensory organs, while perception
refers to the interpretation and organization of these sensory inputs into meaningful experiences.

Br. James Sa Min

Second Year
Psychology

30.7.2024