PSYC101:

Sensation and perception

Jay Hosking, PhD

1
Lecture Overview

§ Basic concepts of sensation and perception

§ Vision: sensory and perceptual processing
§ Audition (hearing)

2 Outline
Learning objectives
1. Differentiate the terms sensation and perception.
2. What is an example of a top-down process? What is an example of a bottom-up process?
3. What is psychophysics? What major discoveries has it revealed?
4. What is priming? How is it related to the idea of subliminal messaging? Does subliminal
messaging work?
5. There are many key terms in this lecture. Be sure to learn any that are bolded or say
“(def)”!
6. Have a fundamental understanding of how visual information reaches the brain.
7. Have a fundamental understanding of how the brain interprets this visual information,
including colour, depth, and motion.
8. What is perceptual constancy? What are some notable examples?
9. What is the physical stimulus that becomes the mental phenomenon of sound? How does
this physical stimulus get transformed into sound?
10. Describe the organs and brain areas related to sound.
11. Describe how pitch (e.g. high versus low) is discriminated.
3 Outline
Basic Concepts of Sensation and Perception
(part 1)
§ Under normal circumstances, sensation and perception are
parts of one continuous process.
§ Sensation (def)
§ Perception (def)

4 Basics
 Basic Concepts of Sensation and Perception
(part 2)
§ Bottom-up processing (def)
§ Top-down processing (def)

5 Basics
Basic Concepts of Sensation and Perception
(part 3)
§ Our senses
§ Receive sensory stimulation, often using
specialized receptor cells
§ Transform that stimulation into neural impulses
(transduction, def)
§ Deliver the neural information to our brain

Hair cell
(Auditory, i.e. sound)

6 Basics
Basic Concepts of Sensation and Perception
(part 4)
§ Psychophysics (def)
§ Signal detection theory (def)
§ Absolute threshold (def)

7 Basics
How much of a stimulus does it take to have a sensation?
(part 1)
§ Absolute threshold (def)
§ Subliminal (def)
§ Priming (def)

8 Basics
How much of a stimulus does it take to have a sensation?
(part 2)
§ Difference threshold, aka just noticeable
difference (def)
§ Weber’s law (def)
§ e.g. 10g vs. 20g, 1010g vs. 1020g

9 Basics
Subliminal Persuasion
§ Subliminal stimuli (def)
§ Subliminal sensation (def)
§ Subliminal persuasion (def)

10 Basics
11 Basics
12 Basics
13 Basics
Basic Concepts of Sensation and Perception
(part 5)
§ Sensory adaptation
§ Diminished sensitivity as a consequence of constant stimulation
§ Increases focus by reducing background chatter
§ Influences how the world is perceived in a personally useful way
§ Think of this as tuning your signal-to-noise ratio
§ Interestingly, this can be for emotions too…

14 Basics
Emotion Adaptation

15 Basics
Emotion Adaptation

16 Basics
Emotion Adaptation

17 Basics
Emotion Adaptation

18 Basics
Emotion Adaptation

19 Basics
20 Basics
21 Basics
Perceptual Set
• Perceptual set (def)
• What determines our perceptual set?
• Schemas (def)
• Context effects
• e.g. Culture
• Motives
• Emotions

22 Basics
Vision: Terms to Learn
§ Wavelength
§ Hue
§ Intensity

§ What is seen as light is only a

thin slice of the broad spectrum
of electromagnetic energy.

23 Vision
Light Energy: From the Environment Into the Brain

• Wavelength (def)
• Frequency (def)
• Amplitude (def)
24 Vision
Vision: The Eye

• Retina
• Accommodation

25 Vision
The Retina’s
Reaction to Light

26 Vision
Rods and Cones

§ Rods and cones provide

special sensitivities.
§ Rods are sensitive to
faint light.
§ Cones are sensitive to
detail and color.

27 Vision
 Vision: Visual Information Processing

§ How does the brain turn light

stimuli into useful information
about the world?
§ Collection and analysis of sensory
information
§ Linkage of the optic nerve with
neurons in the thalamus

§ Important: visual information

from the right half of the world is
processed in the left hemisphere
of the brain (and vice versa)
§ Note: not from only the right eye,
but rather the right half of the world
28 Vision
Information Processing in the Eye and Brain
(part 1)
§ Colour processing
occurs in two stages.
§ 1. Young-Helmholtz
trichromatic theory

29 Vision
Information Processing in the Eye and Brain
(part 1)
§ Colour processing
occurs in two stages.
§ 2. Hering’s opponent
process theory

30 Vision
Information Processing in the Eye and Brain
(part 1)
§ Colour processing
occurs in two stages.
§ 2. Hering’s opponent
process theory

These two theories alone are still insufficient

(i.e. a lot of colour perception is top-down)
31 Vision
Information Processing in the Eye and Brain
(part 2)

§ Feature detection (def)

§ For parallel processing

§ Hubel and Wiesel

§ Occipital lobe reassembles
(and enhances) visual images

§ Visual information travels

from occipital lobe to both
parietal lobe and temporal
lobe

32 Vision
Parallel Processing

33 Vision
Visual Information Processing Simplified

34 Vision
 Vision: Visual
Organization
§ How do we organize
and interpret shapes
and colours to create
meaningful
perceptions?
§ People tend to
organize pieces of
information into an
organized whole,
called a gestalt. Necker cube

35 Vision
Grouping: Seeing Gestalts/Wholes

§ Human minds use grouping strategies to see patterns and

objects.

Others:
Figure-ground
Grouping
Perceptual constancy
Depth perception
36 Vision
Depth Perception

§ Depth perception (def)

§ The visual cliff experiment
§ Uses depth cue

37 Vision
 Seeing Depth: Binocular Cues

§ Binocular cues
§ Two eyes improve perception of depth
§ Retinal disparity
§ Binocular cue for perceiving depth
§ The brain calculates distance by
comparing images from the two eyes
§ Used by 3-D filmmakers

Fun tangent: check your eye dominance!

38 Vision
Seeing Depth: Monocular Cues
§ Monocular cue
§ A depth cue available to
either eye alone
§ Light and shadow
§ Relative motion
§ Aka parallax
§ Relative size
§ Linear perspective
§ Interposition
§ Relative height

39 Vision
Motion Perception

§ Humans are imperfect at motion

perception.
§ Phi phenomenon /
beta movement à
§ An illusion of movement created
when two or more adjacent lights
blink on and off in quick succession
§ The basis/origin of motion picture
films!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_phenomenon

40 Vision
Perceptual Constancy

§ Perceptual constancy (def)

§ Colour constancy (def)
§ Size constancy (def)
§ Relative luminance (def)

41 Vision
Perceptual Constancy

42 Vision
Experience and Visual Perception: Perceptual Interpretation

§ Restored vision and sensory restriction

§ Effects of sensory restriction on infant cats,
monkeys, and humans suggest there is a
critical period for normal sensory and
perceptual development
§ Without stimulation, normal connections do not
develop and cannot develop well later
§ Perceptual adaptation
§ Ability to adjust to changed sensory input,
including an artificially displaced or even
inverted visual field
43 Vision
 Hearing, aka audition

§ Sound waves: From the

environment into the brain
§ Sound waves compress and
expand air molecules.
§ The ears detect these brief
pressure changes.

44 Audition
Hearing: Sound Characteristics (part 1)
§ Sound waves are bands of compressed and expanded air.

45 Audition
Hearing: Sound Characteristics (part 2)
§ We interpret characteristics of the air pressure waves as
characteristics of sound.

46 Audition
Decoding: Transforming Sound Energy Into Neural Messages

47 Audition
Hearing: Decoding Sound Waves

§ Sound waves strike the eardrum, causing it to vibrate.

§ Tiny bones in the middle ear transmit the vibrations to the
cochlea, a coiled, fluid-filled tube in the inner ear.
§ Ripples in the fluid of the cochlea bend the hair cells lining the
surface, which trigger impulses in nerve cells.
§ Axons from these nerve cells transmit a signal to the thalamus
and from there to the auditory cortex.

48 Audition
Intensity of Some Common Sounds

49 Audition
 Perceiving Loudness, Pitch, and Location
§ Place theory in hearing
§ Explains high pitches best
§ Frequency theory
(temporal theory) in
hearing
§ Explains low pitches best
§ Combinations of place and
frequency theories Place theory

§ Handle the pitches in the

intermediate range

50 Audition
How Do We Locate Sounds?
§ Two ears are better than one!

51 Audition