Chapter 5: Sensing and Perceiving
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter you should be able to:
- Review and summarize the capacities and limitations of human sensation.
- Explain the difference between sensation and perception and describe how psychologists measure sensory and difference thresholds.
- Identify the key structures of the eye and the role they play in vision.
- Summarize how the eye and the visual cortex work together to sense and perceive the visual stimuli in the environment, including processing colours, shape, depth and motion.
- Draw a picture of the ear, label its key structures and functions, and describe the role they play in hearing.
- Describe the process of transduction in hearing.
- Summarize how the senses of taste and olfaction transduce stimuli into perceptions.
- Describe the process of transduction in the senses of touch and proprioception.
- Outline the gate control theory of pain. Explain why pain matters and how it may be controlled.
- Describe how sensation and perception work together through sensory interaction, selective attention, sensory adaptation and perceptual constancy.
- Give examples of how our expectations may influence our perception, resulting in illusions and potentially inaccurate judgments.
