The Five Senses

12 Key excerpts on "The Five Senses"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  AP® Psychology All Access Book + Online + Mobile

  • Nancy Fenton, Jessica Flitter, Jessica Flitter(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Research & Education Association

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 6 Sensation and Perception

  What does one know about his or her world? Since the beginning of scientific psychology, psychologists have been interested in understanding sensation and perception and how these two interconnected processes relate to cognition and behavior. Psychophysics , a branch of psychology strongly influenced by German scientist Gustav Fechner , studies how physical stimuli (sensations) translate to psychological experiences (perceptions). Sensation involves how an organism receives stimuli and information from the surrounding world via the sensory organs. Psychophysicists investigate the human senses, including vision, audition (hearing), gustation (taste), olfaction (smell), somatic (touch, temperature, pain), vestibular, and kinesthetic. Each sense has specific receptor cells located in the sense organs, which transform physical stimuli into neural impulses in a process known as transduction . The complementary process to sensation is perception , which involves the interpretation of sensations. Perception includes the cognitive processes of receiving, encoding, storing, and organizing sensations.

  STUDY TIP

  Be able to distinguish between the processes of sensation and perception .

  Thresholds

  How intense does a stimulus have to be to produce a sensation? Psychophysicists have answered this question with absolute thresholds , or the minimum intensity of stimulation needed for detection 50 percent of the time. For example, an experimenter attempting to find an individual’s absolute threshold for sound may walk away from the individual with a ticking watch. As soon as the individual cannot reliably hear the watch 50 percent of the time, the experimenter has determined that individual’s approximate absolute threshold for sound.

  A subliminal stimulus is a weak stimulus presented below threshold that cannot be consciously registered. Research has questioned if very weak or quick stimuli below one’s level of consciousness can be interpreted; this is known as subliminal perception . Although subliminal commands to change behaviors have not been confirmed, there is some evidence that subliminal stimuli may have a subtle influence on behavior, but the influence is neither strong nor long-lasting. Any claims by advertisers that subliminal messages can change complex behaviors, such as ending addictions or learning a new language, are not

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  Real World Psychology

  • Karen R. Huffman, Catherine A. Sanderson(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Psychologists are keenly interested in our senses because they are our mind’s win- dow to the outside world. We’re equally interested in how our mind perceives and interprets the information it receives from the senses. Sensation begins with specialized receptor cells located in our sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and internal body tissues). When sense organs detect an appropriate stimulus (light, mechanical pressure, chemical molecules), they con- vert it into neural impulses (action potentials) that are transmitted to our brain. Through the process of perception , the brain then assigns meaning to this sensory information (Table 4.1). Processing Our eyes, ears, skin, and other sense organs all contain special cells called receptors, which receive and process sensory information from the environment. For each sense, these specialized cells respond to a distinct stimulus, such as sound waves or odor molecules. Next, during the process of transduction , the receptors convert the energy from the specific sensory stimulus into neural impulses, which are sent to the brain. For example, in hearing, tiny receptor cells in the inner ear convert mechanical vibra- tions from sound waves into electrochemical signals. Neurons then carry these signals to the brain, where specific sensory receptors detect and interpret the information. How does our brain differentiate between sensations, such as sounds and smells? Through a process known as coding , the brain interprets different physical LEARNING OBJECTIVES Sensation The process of detecting, convert- ing, and transmitting raw sensory information from the external and internal environments to the brain. Perception The processes of selecting, orga- nizing, and interpreting sensory information into meaningful patterns; interpreting sensory images as having been produced by stimuli from the external, three-dimensional world.

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  Virtual Reality and Virtual Environments in 10 Lectures

  • Stanislav Stanković(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Springer

    (Publisher)

  35 C H A P T E R 3 Lecture 3–Human Senses 3.1 OUTLINE OF THE LECTURE VR systems try to create the feeling of presence in a VE by providing artificial computer-generated stimuli to human senses. e subjective user experience is the ultimate measure of the quality of design of any VE. erefore, many of the requirements imposed on the functionality of VR systems stem from the physiological properties of human sensory organs. In this lecture, we will examine the behavior and physiology of the most important of human senses, in order to better understand the constraints within which VR systems must operate. We begin our discussion by talking about general properties shared by all human sensory organs. We will talk in detail about the human visual system, as this sense is our most important source of information. We will also examine the human sense of hearing as our second most important sense and the main channel of communication. In addition to this, we will examine the vestibular apparatus and its interplay with the human visual system. Finally, we will talk about a group of senses which are usually considered together but actually represent a set of very diverse yet related mechanisms, namely haptic sense and sense of proprioception. 3.2 HUMAN SENSES e classic list of senses which we have all learned in the elementary school includes: the vi- sual sense, sense of hearing, senses of touch, smell, and taste. is list originates from ancient Greece. It was first presented by Aristotle in his book under the title of Perì Psūchês, or On the Soul. is list reflects the understanding of human anatomy and physiology available to ancient people. However, the scientific research conducted in centuries that followed revealed that the human body is actually equipped with a much larger variety of senses.

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  Psychology

  Made Simple

  • Abraham P. Sperling, Kenneth Martin(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Made Simple

    (Publisher)

  As for the 'facial vision' of the blind, three Cornell University psy-chologists have shown that it is not mysterious at all. Before showing just what this so-called 'sixth sense' really is, let us say that it is not the effect of atmospheric pressure on the skin, electromagnetic vibra-tions, or slight changes in temperature. By alternately covering the face of their subjects, covering the exposed parts of the skin, eliminat-ing the ability to smell, and plugging the ears, Karl Dallenbach, Michael Supa, and Milton Cotzin found that the blind 'perceive' objects by their sense of hearing. Experiments on hundreds of blind people have shown that their sense of hearing is no more powerful than normal. However, it has been trained by adversity and experience. The blind person's inability to see had made it necessary for him to pay more attention to what he hears, often without his knowing it. Indeed, some normal-sighted people have developed their hearing to the point where they too could 'see' in the dark. Sensation and Perception 29 OUR SENSE OF TASTE AND SMELL Descriptions oftaste and smell as sensory mechanisms are traditionally linked in books on general psychology. There is a good reason for this. Investigations by psychologists have shown that many of the things we believe we are tasting, are only susceptible to discrimination by our sense of taste plus smell. You may not readily believe it, but with your eyes closed and your nose clogged, you could not accurately taste the difference between a slice of an apple and a potato. Taste Receptors. The taste receptors are microscopic hair cells within the 'taste buds'. These are located in the papillae of the tongue, epi-glottis and soft palate. The hair cells in each taste bud are connected to a nerve and react to chemicals in the liquids of foods when they penetrate the pits in the tongue. Taste is considered a chemical sense and requires a liquid solution for stimulation.

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  Handbook of Psychology, History of Psychology

  • (Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Fortunately, a broad overview shows that it is possible to see some unifying perspectives that have evolved through the history of the study of perception and are not bound to any single sensory modality. This seems to have been recognized by many researchers in this area, since it is not uncommon for them to do research on several sensory systems at the same time. Thus, we find Helmholtz and Hering studying both vision and audition, and Georg von Békésy, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on hearing, also did research on vision and touch. When it comes to theorists, Fechner, Stevens, Ames, Gibson, Wertheimer, Koffka, Helson, and others have presented frameworks, models, and mechanisms that are virtually modality independent, and can be tested and applied to vision, hearing, or any other sensory system. This is not to deny that there are issues that are important to particular single sensory modalities that do not generalize. For example, the chain of events that leads from the absorption of a photon to a visual neural response and ultimately to a conscious recognition of the stimulus seems to be unique to vision. Instead, I am suggesting that there are global theoretical and methodological frameworks that encompass all sensory and perceptual research. To refer back to that very specific issue of visual detection, while the mechanism of how a photon is captured is specific to sight, all sensory modalities must deal with the idea of detection, which includes the idea of sensory thresholds and their relationship to what the individual consciously perceives. It is also likely that the higher level decisional processes, where the observer must decide if a stimulus is there or not, will be the same whether one is dealing with vision, audition, olfaction, or any other sensory system. Thus, we find that there are certain common issues and definitions that cut across all sensory modalities. These methods, philosophical foundations, and psychological understandings have undergone a steady evolution during the history of this area of psychological research.

  This chapter is written as an overview and concentrates on some general themes, rather than on the data and findings from any one sensory modality. From this, hopefully, some idea of the context and scope of the study of perception, and its relationship to other aspects of psychology and other sciences, will emerge. Three global issues will reappear many times and in several guises during this history. The first deals with the perceptual problem, which is really the issue of the correspondence (or noncorrespondence) between our internal representation of the environment in consciousness and the objectively measured external physical situation. The second has to do with the borrowing of methods, viewpoints, and theoretical formulations from other sciences, such as physics and physiology. The third is the distinction between sensation and perception, which is really the distinction between stimulus-determined aspects of conscious and interpretive or information-processing contributions to the conscious perceptual experience.

  The Perceptual Problem

  We must begin our discussion with some philosophical considerations. This is not merely because all of science began as philosophy, nor because up until the middle of the 20th century, philosophy and psychology departments were often combined as the same academic entity in many universities. The reason that we begin with philosophy is because it takes a shift in philosophical viewpoint to justify why we need a psychological discipline to study sensation and perception in the first place. Most people have a naïve, realistic faith in the ability of our senses to convey an accurate picture of the world to us. For the proverbial “man on the street,” there is no perceptual problem. You open your eyes and the world is there. According to this viewpoint, we perceive things the way that we do because that is the way that they are. We see something as a triangular shape because it is triangular. We feel roughness through our sense of touch because the surface is rough. Thomas Reid, a Scottish philosopher who will later prove to be very significant in the history of perception, summarized this idea in 1785 when he wrote:

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  Physiological Psychology

  An Introduction

  • Simon Green(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  With each of our senses, or modalities, we respond to (or are aware of) a range of stimuli; we see bright and dark objects, hear high-pitched and low-pitched sounds, taste sweet and sour foods. The range we respond to represents only a proportion of the available range, and for every sensory modality we could find another species with a different battery of sensory receptors and which therefore responded to a different range of stimuli. So, to return to my opening point, each species constructs its own view of the world, based upon the surrounding stimuli it can transduce into the sensory information which serves as the basis of perception; but although each species occupies a unique perceptual niche, related species such as the higher mammals usually show substantial similarity in the structure and organization of sensory systems.

  Our sensory systems may be readily divided into the five traditional modalities – vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste -plus pain and proprioception, which concerns the awareness of bodily movement and position in space. They may be further classified into functional groups: e.g. exteroceptive senses, covering those modalities dealing with the outside world such as vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell; proprioceptive senses (as above); and interoceptive senses, covering those sensory receptors handling information from internal structures, such as pressure receptors and glucose receptors in the walls of blood vessels. However, the most straightforward approach is to consider the various sensory modalities one by one. I shall outline the organization of sensory systems dealing with touch, taste, and smell, cover pain and hearing in more detail, and then discuss the visual system at length. Although this matches relative importance as assessed by the amount of research devoted to each, it should be emphasized that the hearing or auditory system in particular is as relevant to the psychologist as the visual system.

  Touch

  The sensation of touch comes in various forms, all involving stimulus contact with a variety of touch receptors in the skin. The sensations include light and heavy touch pressure, tickling and movement of a stimulus across the skin, cold and warmth, and pain. Categories overlap – a cold stimulus applied with heavy pressure can result in pain.

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  Visualizing Psychology

  • Siri Carpenter, Karen Huffman(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  A network of neurons in the retina transmits neural information to the brain. 3 Our Other Important Senses 98 • Smell and taste, sometimes called the chemical senses, involve chemoreceptors that are sensitive to certain chemical molecules. In olfaction , odor molecules stimu-late receptors in the olfactory epithelium, in the nose, as shown in the diagram. The resulting neural impulse travels to the olfactory bulb, where the information is processed before being sent elsewhere in the brain. Our sense of taste ( gustation ) involves five tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (umami means “savory” or “delicious”). The taste buds are clustered on our tongues within the papillae. • The outer ear gathers sound waves; the middle ear amplifies and concentrates the sounds; and the inner ear changes the mechanical energy of sounds into neural impulses. The fre-quency and intensity of sounds determine how we distinguish among sounds of different pitches and loudness, respectively. Olfactory bulb Olfactory receptor neuron Olfactory axons Mucous Nasal cavity Inside the brain Odorants Supporting cell What a Psychologist Sees: The smell pathway • The body senses tell the brain how the body is oriented, where and how it is moving, and what it touches, or is touched by. They include the skin senses , the vestibular sense , and kinesthesis . 114 CHAPTER 4 Sensation and Perception 4 Understanding Perception 101 • Perception is the process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting incoming sensations into useful mental repre-sentations of the world. Selective attention allows us to fil-ter out unimportant sensory messages. Feature detectors are specialized cells that respond only to certain sensory information. Habituation is the tendency to ignore stimuli that remain constant. People tend to automatically select stimuli that are intense, novel, moving, and contrasting. • To be useful, sensory data must be assembled in a mean -ingful way.

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  Real World Psychology

  • Catherine A. Sanderson, Karen R. Huffman(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  104 CHAPTER 4 Sensation and Perception 4.3 Our Other Important Senses LEARNING OBJECTIVES Retrieval Practice While reading the upcoming sections, respond to each Learning Objective in your own words. Review the processes involved in smell, taste, and the body senses. • Explain the key factors in olfaction and gustation, and how the two senses interact. • Describe how the body senses (skin, vestibular, and kinesthesis) work. Vision and audition may be the most prominent of our senses, but the others—smell, taste, and the body senses—are also important for gathering information about our environment. Smell and Taste Smell and taste are sometimes called the chemical senses because they both rely on chemore- ceptors that are sensitive to certain chemical molecules. Have you wondered why we have trouble separating the two sensations? Smell and taste receptors are located near each other and closely interact (Figure 4.13). Our sense of smell, olfaction, which results from stimulation of receptor cells in the nose, is remarkably useful and sensitive. We possess more than 1,000 types of olfactory receptors, which allow us to detect more than 10,000 distinct smells. The nose is more sensitive to smoke than any electronic detector, and—through practice—blind people can quickly recognize oth- ers by their unique odors. Some research on pheromones—chemicals released by organisms that trigger certain responses, such as aggression or sexual mating, in other members of the same species—also affect human sexual responses (Baum & Cherry, 2015; Jouhanneau et al., 2014; Ottaviano et al., 2015). However, others suggest that human sexuality is far more complex than that of other animals (Chapters 10 and 14). Today, the sense of taste, gustation, which results from stimulation of receptor cells in the tongue’s taste buds, may be the least critical of our senses. In the past, however, it prob- ably contributed significantly to our survival.

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  Psychology, 6th Australian and New Zealand Edition

  • Lorelle J. Burton, Drew Westen, Robin M. Kowalski(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  According to current thinking, perception proceeds in both directions simultaneously. • Experience with the environment shapes perceptual interpretation by creating perceptual expectations called perceptual set. Two aspects of perceptual set are current context and enduring knowl- edge structures called schemas. Motives, like expectations, can influence perceptual interpretation. KEY TERMS absolute threshold The minimum amount of physical energy (stimulation) needed for an observer to notice a stimulus. accommodation In vision, the changes in the shape of the lens that focus light rays; in Piaget’s theory, the modification of schemas to fit reality. amplitude The difference between the minimum and maximum pressure levels in a sound wave, measured in decibels; amplitude corresponds to the psychological property of loudness. audition Hearing. auditory nerve The bundle of sensory neurons that transmit auditory information from the ear to the brain. binocular cells Neurons that receive information from both eyes. binocular cues Visual input integrated from two eyes that provides perception of depth. bipolar cells Neurons in the retina that combine information from many receptors and excite ganglion cells. blind spot The point on the retina where the optic nerve leaves the eye and which contains no receptor cells. blindsight A phenomenon in which individuals with cortical lesions have no conscious visual awareness but can make discriminations about objects placed in front of them. bottom-up processing Perceptual processing that starts with raw sensory data that feed ‘up’ to the brain; what is perceived is determined largely by the features of the stimuli reaching the sense organs. closure A Gestalt rule of perception which states that people tend to perceive incomplete figures as complete. cochlea The three-chambered tube in the inner ear in which sound is transduced. colour constancy The tendency to perceive the colour of objects as stable despite changing illumination.

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  Psychology in Action

  • Karen R. Huffman, Katherine Dowdell, Catherine A. Sanderson(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Retrieval Practice 4.3 Our Other Important Senses © Billy R. Ray/Wiley 4.4 Understanding Perception LEARNING OBJECTIVES Retrieval Practice While reading the upcoming sections, respond to each Learning Objective in your own words. Summarize the three processes involved in perception. • Explain illusions and why they’re important. • Discuss the process of selection and its three major factors. • Describe the three ways we organize sensory data. • Review the main factors in perceptual interpretation. • Discuss the research findings on ESP and why so many people believe in it. 136 CHAPTER 4 Sensation and Perception There are things known and unknown, and in between are the doors of perception. —Aldous Huxley (English Satiristt, Author of Brave New World) We are ready to move from sensation and the major senses to perception, the process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting incoming sensations into useful mental representations of the world. Normally, our perceptions agree with our sensations. When they do not, the result is called an illusion, a false or misleading impression produced by errors in the perceptual process or by actual physical distortions, as in the so-called moon illusion, in which the moon looks larger at the horizon than when it’s overhead. Illusions are important to psychologists because they provide a unique tool for studying the normal process of perception (Concept Organizer 4.1). Selection In almost every situation, we confront more sensory information than we can reasonably pay attention to. Three major factors help us focus on some stimuli and ignore others: selective attention, feature detectors, and habituation. Certain basic mechanisms for perceptual selection are built into the brain. For example, we’re able to focus our conscious awareness on a specific stimulus while filtering out other stim- uli thanks to the process of selective attention (Figure 4.16).

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  Visualizing Psychology

  • Karen R. Huffman, Alastair Younger, Claire Vanston(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  It is our perceptual system that makes the world feel real, cohesive, and W 1. Describe the relationship among selective attention, feature detectors, and habituation. 2. Summarize the factors involved in perceptual interpretation. 3. Describe the limitations of subliminal perception. The Magic of Perception LEARNING OBJECTIVES perception The higher-level process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting sensory data into useful mental repre- sentations of the world. 2. What are the three basic skin sensations and what are their functions? 3. How do the vestibular and kinesthetic senses differ? a. The skin senses are vital. Skin not only protects our internal organs but also provides our brains with survival and attachment informa- tion. Both humans and non-human animals are highly responsive to physical contact and touch. b. Part of the thrill of amusement park rides comes from overloading the vestibular sense. This sense is used by the eye muscles to maintain visual fixation, and sometimes by the body to change its orientation. We can also become dizzy or nause- ated if the vestibular sense is overloaded by boat, airplane, or automobile motion. Random versus anticipated movements increase chances of mo- tion sickness, explaining why the driver of the car is generally the least likely to get sick. Children between ages 2 and 12 years have the greatest susceptibility to motion sickness, and it tends to decline with age. c. Without his finely tuned kinesthetic sense to provide information about his bodily posture, orientation, and movement, Canadian snowboarding Olympic gold medallist Jasey-Jay Anderson would be on his way to the hospital rather than the win- ner’s podium. Roy Toft/National Geographic Stock Mike Kemp/© RubberBall/Alamy Sean/Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press 112 CHAPTER 4 Sensation and Perception a. Müller-Lyer illusion b. Magnetic Hill illusion c. Checkershadow illusion (i) (ii) Tourism Moncton © 1995, Edward H.

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  Discovering Psychology

  The Science of Mind

  • John Cacioppo, Laura Freberg(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  As you’ll see in this chapter, we carefully construct models of reality from the information we obtain through our senses. We like to think that we are aware of the world around us, and it is somewhat unsettling to realize that the world might be quite different from the representations of reality formed by the human mind. You will learn how the models built by the human mind have promoted our survival over many generations. Our models of reality are quite different from those built by the minds of other animals, whose survival often depends on obtaining different types of information from the environment around them. 148 Learning Objectives 1. Explain basic concepts of sensation and perception, including transduction of stimuli into neural signals, distinctions between bottom-up and top-down perceptual processing, thresholds, and measurement. 2. Analyze the process by which the physical structures of the eye transduce light waves into neural signals producing the sense of vision. 3. Explain the processes responsible for color vision, object recognition, and depth perception. 4. Analyze the process by which physical structures of the ear transduce sound waves into neural signals, producing perception of pitch, loudness, and spatial location in hearing. 5. Summarize the mechanisms by which the somatosensory and chemical sense systems produce perception of body position, touch, skin temperature, pain, smell, and taste. 6. Analyze the causes of various individual differences in perception (including development and culture) in terms of biology, experience, and their interaction. How Does Sensation Lead to Perception? Our bodies are bombarded with information, whether we are asleep or awake. This informa-tion can take many forms, from the electromagnetic energy of the sun to vibrations in the air to molecules dissolved in the saliva on our tongue. The process of sensation brings informa-F i g u r e 5.1 The Munker Illusion and Color Deficiency.

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