Sensation and Perception

Hugh J. Foley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000300802
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Maintaining the strong pedagogy, abundant student-friendly examples, and engaging conversational style of the previous editions, the sixth edition of this introductory textbook makes technical scientific information accessible to those who are beginning to specialize in cognitive psychology. Sensation and Perception, Sixth Edition is newly available in a more affordable paperback version, making it ideal for undergraduate students.

In this new edition Bates has built on Foley and Matlin's core text to add updates focusing on multisensory integration, neural plasticity, and cognitive neuroscience, as well as real-world examples and practical applications of psychological phenomena. The sixth edition retains the clear organization of previous versions, covering a wide range of core topics, from skin senses such as touch to chemical senses such as taste and smell, to our complex visual and auditory sensory systems.

This book is essential reading for undergraduates and postgraduates studying courses on sensation and perception.

C H A P T E R 1

Introduction

Preview of the Book

Overview of Theoretical Approaches to Sensation and Perception

The Behaviorist Approach

The Empiricist Approach

The Gestalt Approach

The Gibsonian Approach

The Information-Processing Approach

The Computational Approach

Themes of the Book

How to Use This Book

Off to a very interesting start. What’s going on here? Oops! Okay, now we’re on track. As you read this text, you are demonstrating extraordinary sensory and perceptual abilities. Once we oriented the text properly, your eyes are moving along this page at a steady pace, identifying letters and words so fast as to defy explanation. If you’re like most people, you tend to take sensation and perception for granted because your senses operate so naturally and automatically. You open your eyes and see text, people, plants, and parrots. You open your mouth, insert a morsel of food, and taste tomatoes, cheesecake, curried goat. What could be simpler? Perception, however, is a complex puzzle that has intrigued philosophers and psychologists for centuries.

One important goal of this book is to teach you about the many subtle processes that underlie perception. Just as the beginning of the first paragraph probably brought you to an abrupt halt, we hope to challenge your assumptions about the simplicity of perception. Think about your experience as you started to read the first paragraph. Why did the unusual orientation of the text make reading so difficult? What does such difficulty tell you about the nature of perception? Throughout these chapters, we hope to present you with similar intriguing perceptual experiences that will help you explore the complexities of perception.

The title of this book is Sensation and Perception. Before going any further, we should define these terms. Sensation refers to the functioning of our sensory systems. Perception involves the interpretation of those sensations, giving them meaning and organization. Psychologists acknowledge a fuzzy boundary between these two terms, although we could reasonably shorten the title to Perception. William James (1842–1910) has often been called America’s greatest psychologist. James (1890) noted, “Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes … out of our own head” (Vol. 2, p. 103). James is acknowledging the constructed nature of our perceptual experience. Throughout the text, you’ll find examples that support James’s contention.

A fuzzy boundary also exists between perception and cognition. Cognition involves the acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of information. The boundary between perception and cognition blurs because many theorists believe that perception also involves the acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of information. For example, learning and memory play important roles in cognition, but they also play important roles in perception. If you reflect on your experience as you read the opening paragraph, you likely encountered difficulty because your past experience did not prepare you to read text in an unusual orientation. You might also imagine that, with additional experience, you could become adept at reading text in an unusual orientation. The more you learn about cognition, the more you’ll appreciate the complexities of perception. We certainly encourage you to take a course in cognition if you have not already done so. Several good cognition texts are available, should you be interested in exploring this area (e.g., Matlin, 2009; Solso et al., 2008).

Perception and cognition work together to create the world we experience. To examine how they do so, let’s consider an example. Figure 1.1 shows a city scene. As you look at the figure, sensory receptors in your eye encode elements of the scene, leading to a series of neural impulses. Those impulses create activity in your brain that yields a reasonably accurate perception of the real world. Your knowledge of the world lets you perceive structures (e.g., different bricks, windows) on three distinct buildings. How do you know that the heads are larger-than-life sculptures? How do you know which of the buildings is closest to you? Try turning the page upside down, to create an unusual viewing perspective. With little experience viewing buildings in this unusual orientation, does your perception change? It’s important to mention that the various sensory systems do not work in isolation; they interact with one another and affect each other’s processing. Multisensory integration is the process by which the nervous system combines information across senses to form a unified and coherent representation of the external world. Our ability to integrate sensory information is essential in our everyday lives, allowing us to identify events and respond optimally. The combination of information from two sensory modalities can decrease response time, increase target detection accuracy, and reduce detection thresholds. For instance, human participants responded faster to simultaneous visual and tactile stimuli than to single visual or tactile stimuli (Forster, Cavina-Pratesi, Agolioti, & Berlucchi, 2001). Similar results have been found with other pairs of sensory modalities.

Why should you study sensation and perception? We can think of many reasons, but we’ll only mention some of them here. As you read through the text, try to identify other reasons that make this an important area of study. One reason concerns a question of interest to philosophers. We mentioned the challenge of re-creating the qualities of objects, of bringing the outside world to the inside mind. A branch of philosophy called epistemology concerns how we acquire knowledge, including knowledge about the properties of objects. One intriguing concern of epistemology is whether we require experience with the world before we can perceive it accurately. Can your 2-month-old niece have accurate knowledge, for instance, about how far away the side of the crib is from her nose, or must she learn about distance through repeated experiences of reaching, grasping, and bumping?

Other philosophical questions are equally intriguing. For instance, you might consider the central role that perception plays in your experience of who and where you are. Think of what your life would be like if you had absolutely no perceptual experience. Daniel Dennett’s (1978) essay “Where am I?” says a lot about the important role of perceptual experience.

The study of sensation and perception has played a pivotal role in the history of psychology. Thus, in learning about sensation and perception, you will also be learning about some of the early research in psychology. Exploring sensation and perception also provides a background for other areas of psychology. As we’ve already mentioned, these two areas are closely associated with cognition—a vital topic in psychology since the last half of the twentieth century. Sensation and perception also have important links to many other areas of psychology. In fact, if you have an introductory psychology textbook handy, turn to the table of contents and notice how you might relate each of the major topics to perception.

As you read each chapter of this book, you should be able to envision ways that perceptual topics apply to your daily life. For example, you’ll learn why you can more easily detect a faint star if you don’t look directly at it (Chapter 3). You’ll also learn why you shouldn’t expose your fragile auditory system to loud sounds (Chapter 9). If you become a parent, you will benefit from knowing how your child’s perceptual abilities develop (Chapter 14). Several chapters (e.g., Chapters 3, 9, 14) will provide a forecast of changes in perceptual abilities that you’ll likely encounter as you age.

FIGURE 1.1 A typical street scene to illustrate perceptual principles.

Perception also applies directly to educational and work settings. For example, reading teachers can apply what psychologists have learned about eye movements (Chapter 4) and letter identification (Chapter 5). Topics in many chapters apply to different health professions. For example, our discussions of most senses describe disorders of those senses. Many health professionals would certainly be interested in pain perception and pain reduction (Chapter 12).

Another reason for reading this book is more personal. You own some exceptional equipment. Your sensory systems (e.g., visual, auditory, etc.) are extremely sensitive and even a bit fragile. Nonetheless, you may know more about how a vacuum cleaner or an automobile works. You’ll be living the remainder of your life with your sensory systems, so it should be both interesting and useful to know them more intimately.

Finally, you should study perception because it’s fun. Okay, maybe we’re a bit biased, but we think that it’s fun to study perception. If we do our jobs properly, we will convey to you the pleasure we experience when studying these fascinating topics in perception. In the next section, we’ll highlight some of the topics that we’re about to explore.

Preview of the Book

Did you ever wonder why anyone would write a textbook? We can assure you that writing a perception text is not the path to fame and fortune. Moreover, it’s a difficult and time-consuming process. Why, then, did we write this book? The simplest answer is that we’re both teachers who take great pleasure in educating the students in our classrooms. We also like the idea that we may play a role in educating students at other institutions.

We chose to write a perception textbook because we both see the area as central to our discipline. As you read this book, you will probably recognize many of the perceptual issues as common to other areas of psychology. For instance, most of the important “stuff” of perception occurs in a person’s mind—so it’s not directly accessible. You will likely recognize that problem as central to psychology. However, it’s not all inside a person’s mind. We live in a world of other people, other organisms, and inanimate objects. In order to survive in that world, it’s vital that we perceive it accurately. This book is about how our senses enable us to function in that world.

A number of different disciplines are interested in perception. As a result, in order to adequately discuss perception, we’ll be considering topics that you might regard as anatomy, physiology, or neuroscience. Those disciplines are crucial for understanding how energy from stimuli in the outside world is conveyed to and processed in the brain. Nonetheless, our focus is certainly psychological.

The chapter you’re reading provides a helpful overview of the entire text. By reading this chapter first, you’ll have a better sense of how we’ve chosen to organize topics. It also alerts you to concepts that recur throughout the book. For example, in the next section we’ll discuss major theoretical approaches to sensation and perception. As you read later chapters, you’ll see how these approaches drive the research in different areas. To further help you integrate material across chapters, we also provide you with some themes that will weave through the text. Finally, we offer some hints about how to use the book to better learn the material.

The next chapter (Chapter 2) is an important methodological one. The chapter focuses primarily on psychophysics—the study of the relationship between physical stimuli and our psychological reaction to them. It’s our first opportunity to clarify the distinction between the physical stimulus and the perception of the stimulus. For example, we’ll address why you can notice a 5-pound weight loss more easily for Pat, who weighs 100 pounds, than for Chris, who weighs 200 pounds. The chapter also describes the use of some brain-imaging techniques that are used to better understand perceptual processes.

The next five chapters focus on the visual system. Chapter 3 provides an overview of the visual system, because you need to know the structure of the visual equipment before proceeding to other topics. In that chapter, we examine the anatomy of the eye, discuss how visual information travels to the brain, and explore how the brain processes the visual information. Thus, Chapter 3 focuses largely on anatomy and physiology. As a result of technological advances, researchers are making great strides in understanding ho...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Ontroduction
• Chapter 2 Research Methods
• Chapter 3 The Visual System
• Chapter 4 Basic Visual Functions
• Chapter 5 Visual Pattern Perception
• Chapter 6 Distance and Size Perception
• Chapter 7 Color
• Chapter 8 Motion
• Chapter 9 The Auditory System
• Chapter 10 Basic Auditory Functions
• Chapter 11 Auditory Pattern Perception
• Chapter 12 The Skin Senses
• Chapter 13 The Chemical Senses Taste and Smell
• Chapter 14 Perceptual Development
• Glossary
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index