PSYC 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Interposition, Parietal Lobe, We Exist

• School: Memorial University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1000
• Professor: Mark Hebert

Document Summary

A subfield of psychology that examines processes related to the detection and perception of sensory stimuli. Historic roots in psychophysics ernst heinrich weber and gustav theodore fechner (1800"s) Also, gestalt psychology kurt koffka, max wertheimer, and wolfgang kohler (early 1900"s) Sensation: the act of using our sensory systems to detect environmental stimuli. External energy is turned into internal neural signals (passed into cns) Perception: the act of recognizing and identifying internalized sensory stimuli. Perception is achieved by bottom up and top down processing (more later) Common feature of sensation and perception include: transduction, detection threshold, difference thresholds, sensory adaptations, bottom up and top down processing, and perceptual set. Our senses enable us to detect (and then perceive) various forms of energy, within particular ranges. Pressure, damage to the skin, thermal energy (temperatures) Transduction: the process of converting an external physical stimulus into neural impulses. Sensory receptor cells: specialized cells that convert a form of environmental stimuli into neural impulses.