My full notes from the 2020 cohort. Includes the following topics:
Introduction to sensation and perception
Neurons, the origin of behaviour
Light and the eye
Perceiving colour
Perceiving depth and size
Eye movements and the perception of motion
Sounds and the auditory system
PSY1005 – Sensation and Perception
Lecture 1 – Introduction to Sensation
• Main textbook is Schatner, additional is Goldstein's Sensation and Perception
• Every week there will be a:
o Lecture
o Cog lab experiments - not compulsory
o Goldstein goes way beyond what we need in scope, but Schatner goes too slowly
o Use the lecture as a road map to cover topics and concepts you are expected to know
• Use discussion board for general questions and communications
• Sensation - an elementary process at beginning of sensory system, such as light in the eye
• Purpose of perception
o Functional - to inform us about properties of the environment that are important for our
survival
o Achieved using information from our senses our perceptual system creates a model of
the environment in our minds
o
• Model
o Important to apricate that the reconstructed representation (model) of environment is
not simply a replica of our surrounding physical environment
o Some stimuli in isolation may appear differently in the presence of other stimuli
o We sometimes see 'things' that are not there
o We fail sometimes to see things that are in fact out there
o Such cases indicate the process of building an internal model of our environment,
namely forming perceptions, does rely on some sorted knowledge of the physical
properties of objects in our environment
• Summary of the visual perceptual process
, o
o
o Perceptual psychology is interested in the processes up to step 5 - then it becomes cognitive.
However, the stages 6 and 7 are required to give context to perception
o Look at the neurological basis of perception - brains are made out of neurons that
communicate with each other using electrical signals
o Problem is that said electrical signals are the only language that brains can understand
o This is an issue as stimuli don’t arrive as electrical signals
• Eye - electromagnetic radiation
• Ear - air pressure
• Vestibular system - mechanical energy
• Tongue and nose - chemical/molecular energy)
• Skin (thermal, mechanical and chemical energy)
o Transduction - the process by which individual sense organs transduce energy form any
environmental events into neural activity
o Each sense organ contains specialised receptors that translate the energy from
corresponding stimuli into neural activity which our brains can then process
o Distal v proximal stimulus
• Distal (root - distant) - the observed stimulus. E.g. a tree
• Proximal stimulus - Stimulus in proximity to the receptors. E.g. an image of a tree in
someone's retina
• Distal becomes proximal through the principle of representation - everything a
person perceives is not based on direct contact with stimuli, but on representations
of stimuli that are formed on the receptor and the resulting activity in the nervous
system
o Transmission - carries the signals from receptors to the brain and around the brain
o Processing occurs during interactions among neurons in the brain
,o
o
• Sensory adaptation
o To measure differences, Fechner proposed just noticeable difference (JND) - the
minimal change in a stimulus that can just barely be detected
o This can be calculated using Weber's law - the just noticeable difference of a
stimulus is a constant proportion despite variations in intensity
o This has clear evolutionary benefits, as it means stimuli we are used to no longer
distract our attention
• Two interactive processes in perception
o Bottom-up processing
• Processing based on incoming stimuli from the environment
, • Also called data-based processing
o Top down processing
• Processing based on the perceiver's previous knowledge (cognitive fact0rs)
• Also called knowledge-based processing
•
• How to study perception
o Observing the perceptual processes at different stages in the system
• Psychophysical approach (PP) - the stimulus-perception relationship
• Physiological approach (PH1) - the stimulus-physiology relationship
• Physiological approach (PH2) - the physiology and perception relationship
o These stages are interrelated and inform one another; we will consider several
examples from each approach throughout this course
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