PSY 100 Lecture Notes - Sensory System, Visual System, Visual Acuity
Document Summary
Transduction of stimulus information from eye to brain. Purpose: ability to accurately make sense of the world around us. Process: physical energy (stimulus) is encoded by our senses, converted in to electrical activity that is sent to the brain, and then it enters our conscious awareness for interpretation. Sensation is the stimulation of a sense organ by stimuli in our environment. Light, sound, pressure, odor, or taste are detected by specialized body parts (e. g. , light detected by receptors in our eyes) Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensation by our brain. Results in a mental representation of the stimulus. With vision, there are over 30 parts of the brain that could go into interpreting what we see. The sensation and perception collaboration: reading as an example. Eyes detect different light patterns on a page (lines and curves) -> sensation. Brain transforms sensation into mental images (words/meanings) -> perception.
