How does sensation and perception affect learning

In general, the study of sensation and perception in psychology focuses on learning how our eyes, ears and other sense organs detect stimuli from the world around us and transfer these stimuli into signals that the brain can understand and process.

Sensation is a function of the low-level, biochemical and neurological mechanisms that allow the receptor cells of a sensory organ to detect an environmental stimulus. Humans possess powerful sensory capacities that allow us to sense the kaleidoscope of sights, sounds, smells, and tastes that surround us.

Our eyes detect light energy and our ears pick up sound waves. Our skin senses touch, pressure, hot, and cold. The physical process during which our sensory organs—those involved with hearing and taste, for example—respond to external stimuli is called sensation.

Sensation happens when you eat noodles or feel the wind on your face or hear a car horn honking in the distance. Sensation is the process that allows our brains to take in information via our five senses, which can then be experienced and interpreted by the brain. Sensation occurs thanks to our five sensory systems: vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch.

There are different kinds of stimuli, different sense-organs, and different sensory nerves for different kinds of sensations, visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and cutaneous.

It has been believed for some time that inputs from different sensory organs are processed in different areas in the brain. The perception process consists of four steps: selection, organization, interpretation and negotiation. In the third chapter of our textbook, it defines selection as the stimuli that we choose to attend to. The perception process has three stages: sensory stimulation and selection, organization, and interpretation. Although we are rarely conscious of going through these stages distinctly, they nonetheless determine how we develop images of the world around us.

Components of Perception: According to Alan Saks, there are three important components involved in perception—the perceiver, the target, and the situation. The perceiver is the person who interprets the stimuli. The vast topic of perception can be subdivided into visual perception, auditory perception, olfactory perception, haptic touch perception, and gustatory taste percep- tion.

From time to time, however, we will also look at examples of other kinds of perception to illustrate different points. Perception is how we think about ourselves and our surroundings. Direct realists have it that we perceive physical objects directly. Information is then sent to a variety of different areas of the cortex for more complex processing.

Some of these cortical regions are fairly specialized—for example, for processing faces fusiform face area and body parts extrastriate body area.

Damage to these areas of the cortex can potentially result in a specific kind of agnosia , whereby a person loses the ability to perceive visual stimuli. A great example of this is illustrated in the writing of famous neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks; he experienced prosopagnosia , the inability to recognize faces. Humans have the ability to adapt to changes in light conditions.

As mentioned before, rods are primarily involved in our ability to see in dim light. They are the photoreceptors responsible for allowing us to see in a dark room. You might notice that this night vision ability takes around 10 minutes to turn on, a process called dark adaptation. This is because our rods become bleached in normal light conditions and require time to recover.

We experience the opposite effect when we leave a dark movie theatre and head out into the afternoon sun. During light adaptation , a large number of rods and cones are bleached at once, causing us to be blinded for a few seconds.

Light adaptation happens almost instantly compared with dark adaptation. Interestingly, some people think pirates wore a patch over one eye in order to keep it adapted to the dark while the other was adapted to the light. Our cones allow us to see details in normal light conditions, as well as color.

We have cones that respond preferentially, not exclusively, for red, green and blue Svaetichin, This trichromatic theory is not new; it dates back to the early 19th century Young, ; Von Helmholtz, This theory, however, does not explain the odd effect that occurs when we look at a white wall after staring at a picture for around 30 seconds. Try this: stare at the image of the flag in Figure 3 for 30 seconds and then immediately look at a sheet of white paper or a wall.

According to the trichromatic theory of color vision, you should see white when you do that. Is that what you experienced? This is where the opponent-process theory comes in Hering, This theory states that our cones send information to retinal ganglion cells that respond to pairs of colors red-green, blue-yellow, black-white.

These specialized cells take information from the cones and compute the difference between the two colors—a process that explains why we cannot see reddish-green or bluish-yellow, as well as why we see afterimages.

Color deficient vision can result from issues with the cones or retinal ganglion cells involved in color vision. Some of the most well-known celebrities and top earners in the world are musicians.

Our worship of musicians may seem silly when you consider that all they are doing is vibrating the air a certain way to create sound waves , the physical stimulus for audition. People are capable of getting a large amount of information from the basic qualities of sound waves. The amplitude or intensity of a sound wave codes for the loudness of a stimulus; higher amplitude sound waves result in louder sounds. The pitch of a stimulus is coded in the frequency of a sound wave; higher frequency sounds are higher pitched.

We can also gauge the quality, or timbre , of a sound by the complexity of the sound wave. In order for us to sense sound waves from our environment they must reach our inner ear.

Lucky for us, we have evolved tools that allow those waves to be funneled and amplified during this journey. Initially, sound waves are funneled by your pinna the external part of your ear that you can actually see into your auditory canal the hole you stick Q-tips into despite the box advising against it. During their journey, sound waves eventually reach a thin, stretched membrane called the tympanic membrane eardrum , which vibrates against the three smallest bones in the body—the malleus hammer , the incus anvil , and the stapes stirrup —collectively called the ossicles.

Both the tympanic membrane and the ossicles amplify the sound waves before they enter the fluid-filled cochlea , a snail-shell-like bone structure containing auditory hair cells arranged on the basilar membrane see Figure 4 according to the frequency they respond to called tonotopic organization. Depending on age, humans can normally detect sounds between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. It is inside the cochlea that sound waves are converted into an electrical message.

Because we have an ear on each side of our head, we are capable of localizing sound in 3D space pretty well in the same way that having two eyes produces 3D vision.

Have you ever dropped something on the floor without seeing where it went? Did you notice that you were somewhat capable of locating this object based on the sound it made when it hit the ground?

We can reliably locate something based on which ear receives the sound first. What about the height of a sound? If both ears receive a sound at the same time, how are we capable of localizing sound vertically? After being processed by auditory hair cells, electrical signals are sent through the cochlear nerve a division of the vestibulocochlear nerve to the thalamus, and then the primary auditory cortex of the temporal lobe.

Information from the vestibular system is sent through the vestibular nerve the other division of the vestibulocochlear nerve to muscles involved in the movement of our eyes, neck, and other parts of our body. This information allows us to maintain our gaze on an object while we are in motion.

Disturbances in the vestibular system can result in issues with balance, including vertigo. Who actually enjoys having sand in their swimsuit? Somatosensation —which includes our ability to sense touch, temperature and pain—transduces physical stimuli, such as fuzzy velvet or scalding water, into electrical potentials that can be processed by the brain.

Tactile stimuli —those that are associated with texture—are transduced by special receptors in the skin called mechanoreceptors.

Just like photoreceptors in the eye and auditory hair cells in the ear, these allow for the conversion of one kind of energy into a form the brain can understand. After tactile stimuli are converted by mechanoreceptors, information is sent through the thalamus to the primary somatosensory cortex for further processing.

Put simply, various areas of the skin, such as lips and fingertips, are more sensitive than others, such as shoulders or ankles. This sensitivity can be represented with the distorted proportions of the human body shown in Figure 5. Without pain, how would we know when we are accidentally touching a hot stove, or that we should rest a strained arm after a hard workout?

This raw information from our sensory organs is then transmitted to the brain where perception is made. Perception is our way of interpreting what these sensations mean and how to make sense of it. Sensory abilities are measure by the absolute threshold. HOME How does sensation and perception affect learning.

Page 1 of 50 - About Essays. Sensation and Perception Sensation is how humans process the world around us.