What is Reduction in Sensitivity to Stimulus Continually Applied

5.1 Sensation versus Perception

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Distinguish between sensation and perception
• Describe the concepts of absolute threshold and difference threshold
• Discuss the roles attention, motivation, and sensory adaptation play in perception

SENSATION

   What does it mean to sense something? Sensory receptors are specialized neurons that respond to specific types of stimuli. When sensory information is detected by a sensory receptor, sensation has occurred. For example, light that enters the eye causes chemical changes in cells that line the back of the eye. These cells relay messages, in the form of action potentials (as you learned when studying biopsychology), to the central nervous system. The conversion from sensory stimulus energy to action potential is known as transduction. Transduction represents the first step toward perception and is a translation process where different types of cells react to stimuli creating a signal processed by the central nervous system resulting in what we experience as a sensations. Sensations allow organisms to sense a face, and smell smoke when there is a fire.

Perceptions on the other hand, require organizing and understanding the incoming sensation information. In order for sensations to be useful, we must first add meaning to those sensations, which create our perceptions of those sensations. Sensations allow us to see a red burner, but perceptions entail the understanding and representation of the characteristic hot. Also, a sensation would be hearing a loud, shrill tone, whereas a perception would be the classification and understanding of that sounds as a fire alarm. Throughout this chapter sensations and perceptions will be discussed as separate events, whereas in reality, sensations and perceptions can be more accurately thought of as occurring along a continued where boundaries are more fluent between where a sensation ends and a perception begins.

You have probably known since elementary school that we have five senses: vision, hearing (audition), smell (olfaction), taste (gustation), and touch (somatosensation). It turns out that this notion of five senses is extremely oversimplified. We also have sensory systems that provide information about balance (the vestibular sense), body position and movement (proprioception and kinesthesia), pain (nociception), and temperature (thermoception), and each one of these sensory systems has different receptors tuned to transduce different stimuli. The vision system absorbs light using rod and cone receptors located at the back of the eyes, sound is translated via tiny hair like receptors known as cilia inside the inner ear, smell and taste work together most of the time to absorb chemicals found in airborne particles and food via chemically sensitive cilia in the nasal cavity and clusters of chemical receptors on the tongue. Touch is particularly interesting because it is made up of responses from many different types of receptors found within the skin that send signals to the central nervous system in response to temperature, pressure, vibration, and disruption of the skin such as stretching and tearing.

Free nerve endings embedded in the skin that allow humans to perceive the various differences in our immediate environment. Adapted from Pinel, 2009.

   The sensitivity of a given sensory system to the relevant stimuli can be expressed as an absolute threshold. Absolute threshold refers to the minimum amount of stimulus energy that must be present for the stimulus to be detected 50% of the time. Another way to think about this is by asking how dim can a light be or how soft can a sound be and still be detected half of the time. The sensitivity of our sensory receptors can be quite amazing. It has been estimated that on a clear night, the most sensitive sensory cells in the back of the eye can detect a candle flame 30 miles away (Okawa & Sampath, 2007). Under quiet conditions, the hair cells (the receptor cells of the inner ear) can detect the tick of a clock 20 feet away (Galanter, 1962). Additionally, one teaspoon of sugar can be tasted within two gallons of water, and the human olfactory system can detect the scent of one drop of perfume throughout a six room apartment.

It is also possible for us to get messages that are presented below the threshold for conscious awareness—these are called subliminal messages. A stimulus reaches a physiological threshold when it is strong enough to excite sensory receptors and send nerve impulses to the brain: This is an absolute threshold. A message below that threshold is said to be subliminal: The message is processed, but we are not consciously aware of it. Over the years, there has been a great deal of speculation about the use of subliminal messages in advertising, rock music, and self-help audio programs to influence consumer behavior. Research has demonstrated in laboratory settings, people can process and respond to information outside of awareness. But this does not mean that we obey these messages like zombies; in fact, hidden messages have little effect on behavior outside the laboratory (Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980; Rensink, 2004; Nelson, 2008; Radel, Sarrazin, Legrain, & Gobancé, 2009; Loersch, Durso, & Petty, 2013). Studies attempting to influence movie goers to purchase more popcorn, and reduced smoking habits demonstrated little to no success further suggesting subliminal messages are mostly ineffective in producing specific behavior (Karremans, Stroebe & Claus, 2006). However, neuroimaging studies have demonstrated clear neural activity related to the processing of subliminal stimuli stimuli (Koudier & Dehaene, 2007). Additionally, Krosnick, Betz, Jussim & Lynn (1992) found that participants who were presented images of dead bodies or buckets of snakes for several milliseconds (subliminal priming), were more likely to rate a neutral image of a woman with a neutral facial expression as more unlikable compared to participants who were shown more pleasant images (kittens and bridal couples). This demonstrates that although we may not be aware of the stimuli presented to us, we are processing it on a neural level, and also that although subliminal priming usually is not strong enough to force unwanted purchases, it may influence our perceptions of things we encounter in the environment following the subliminal priming.

Absolute thresholds are generally measured under incredibly controlled conditions in situations that are optimal for sensitivity. Sometimes, we are more interested in how much difference in stimuli is required to detect a difference between them. This is known as the just noticeable difference (JND, mentioned briefly in the above study comparing color perceptions of Chinese and Dutch participants) or difference threshold. Unlike the absolute threshold, the difference threshold changes depending on the stimulus intensity. As an example, imagine yourself in a very dark movie theater. If an audience member were to receive a text message on her cell phone which caused her screen to light up, chances are that many people would notice the change in illumination in the theater. However, if the same thing happened in a brightly lit arena during a basketball game, very few people would notice. The cell phone brightness does not change, but its ability to be detected as a change in illumination varies dramatically between the two contexts. Ernst Weber proposed this theory of change in difference threshold in the 1830s, and it has become known as Weber's law.

Webers Law: Each of the various senses has its own constant ratios determining difference thresholds.

Webers ideas about difference thresholds influenced concepts of signal detection theory which state that our abilities to detect a stimulus depends on sensory factors (like the intensity of the stimulus, or the presences of other stimuli being processed) as well as our psychological state (you are sleepy because you stayed up studying the previous night). Human factors engineers who design control consoles for planes and cars use signal detection theory all the time in order to asses situations pilots or drivers may experience such as difficulty in seeing and interpreting controls on extremely bright days.

PERCEPTION

"Although are perceptions are built from sensations, not all sensations result in perception."

   While our sensory receptors are constantly collecting information from the environment, it is ultimately how we interpret that information that affects how we interact with the world. Perception refers to the way sensory information is organized, interpreted, and consciously experienced. Perception involves both bottom-up and top-down processing. Bottom-up processing refers to the fact that perceptions are built from sensory input, stimuli from the environment. On the other hand, how we interpret those sensations is influenced by our available knowledge, our experiences, and our thoughts related to the stimuli we are experiencing. This is called top-down processing.

One way to think of this concept is that sensation is a physical process, whereas perception is psychological. For example, upon walking into a kitchen and smelling the scent of baking cinnamon rolls, the sensation is the scent receptors detecting the odor of cinnamon, but the perception may be "Mmm, this smells like the bread Grandma used to bake when the family gathered for holidays." Sensation is a signal from any of our six senses. Perception is the brain's response to these signals. When we see our professor speaking in the front of the room, we sense the visual and auditory signals coming from them and we perceive that they are giving a lecture about our psychology class.

Although our perceptions are built from sensations, not all sensations result in perception. In fact, we often don't perceive stimuli that remain relatively constant over prolonged periods of time. This is known as sensory adaptation. Imagine entering a classroom with an old analog clock. Upon first entering the room, you can hear the ticking of the clock; as you begin to engage in conversation with classmates or listen to your professor greet the class, you are no longer aware of the ticking. The clock is still ticking, and that information is still affecting sensory receptors of the auditory system. The fact that you no longer perceive the sound demonstrates sensory adaptation and shows that while closely associated, sensation and perception are different. Additionally, when you walk into a dark movie theater after being outside on a bright day you will notice it is initially extremely difficult to see. After a couple minutes you experience what is known as dark adaptation which tends to take about 8 minutes for cones (visual acuity and color), and about 30 minutes for the cones in your retina to adapt (light, dark, depth and distance) (Hecht & Mendelbaum, 1938; Klaver, Wolfs, Vingerling, Hoffman, & de Jong, 1998). If you are wondering why it takes so long to adapt to darkness, in order to change the sensitivity of rods and cones, they must first undergo a complex chemical change associated with protein molecules which does not happen immediately. Now that you have adapted to the darkens of the theater, you have survived marathon watching the entire Lord of the Rings series, and you are emerging from the theater a seemly short ten hours after entering the theater, you may experience the process of light adaptation, barring it is still light outside. During light adaptation, the pupils constrict to reduce the amount of light flooding onto the retina and sensitivity to light is reduced for both rods and cones which takes usually less than 10 minutes (Ludel, 1978). So why is the process of raising sensitivity to light to adapt to darkness more complex than lowering sensitivity to adapt to light? Caruso (2007) has suggested that a more gradual process is involved in darkness adaptation due to humans tendency over the course of evolution to slowly adjust to darkness as the sun sets over the horizon.

There is another factor that affects sensation and perception: attention. Attention plays a significant role in determining what is sensed versus what is perceived. Imagine you are at a party full of music, chatter, and laughter. You get involved in an interesting conversation with a friend, and you tune out all the background noise. If someone interrupted you to ask what song had just finished playing, you would probably be unable to answer that question.

See for yourself how inattentional blindness works by checking out this selective attention test from Simons and Chabris (1999).

   One of the most interesting demonstrations of how important attention is in determining our perception of the environment occurred in a famous study conducted by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris (1999). In this study, participants watched a video of people dressed in black and white passing basketballs. Participants were asked to count the number of times the team in white passed the ball. During the video, a person dressed in a black gorilla costume walks among the two teams. You would think that someone would notice the gorilla, right? Nearly half of the people who watched the video didn't notice the gorilla at all, despite the fact that he was clearly visible for nine seconds. Because participants were so focused on the number of times the white team was passing the ball, they completely tuned out other visual information. Failure to notice something that is completely visible because of a lack of attention is called inattentional blindness. More recent work evaluated inattention blindness related to cellphone use. Hyman, Boss, Wise, McKenzie & Caggiano (2010) classified participants based on whether they were walking while talking on their cell phone, listening to an MP3 player, walking without any electronics or walking as a pair. Participants were not aware that while they walked through the square a unicycling clown would ride right in front of them. After the students reached the outside of the square they were stopped and asked if they noticed the unicycling clown that rode in front of them. Cell phone users were found to walk more slowly, change directions more often, pay less attention to others around them and were also the most frequent group to report they did not noticed the unicycling clown. David Strayer and Frank Drews additionally examined cell phone use in a series of driving simulators and found that even when participants looked directly at the objects in the driving environment, they were less likely to create a durable memory of those objects if they were talking on a cell phone. This pattern was obtained for objects of both high and low relevance for their driving safety suggesting little meaningful cognitive analysis of objects in the driving environment outside the restricted focus of attention while maintaining a cell phone conversation. Additionally, in-vehicle conversations did not interfere with driving as much as cell phone conversations as Strayer and Drews suggest, drivers are better able to synchronize the processing demands of driving with in-vehicle conversations compared to cell-phone conversations. Overall it is apparent that directing the focus of our attention can lead to sometimes serious impairments of other information, and it appears cell phones can have a particularly dramatic impact on information processing while performing other tasks.

In a similar experiment to the activity above, researchers tested inattentional blindness by asking participants to observe images moving across a computer screen. They were instructed to focus on either white or black objects, disregarding the other color. When a red cross passed across the screen, about one third of subjects did not notice it (figure below) (Most, Simons, Scholl, & Chabris, 2000).

Nearly one third of participants in a study did not notice that a red cross passed on the screen because their attention was focused on the black or white figures. (credit: Cory Zanker)

Motivation can also affect perception. Have you ever been expecting a really important phone call and, while taking a shower, you think you hear the phone ringing, only to discover that it is not? If so, then you have experienced how motivation to detect a meaningful stimulus can shift our ability to discriminate between a true sensory stimulus and background noise. This motivational aspect of expectation in conversation additionally may be why such strong inattentional blindness has been found in relation to cell phone use. The ability to identify a stimulus when it is embedded in a distracting background is called signal detection theory.

Signal detection theory:A theory explaining explaining how various factors influence our ability to detect weak signals in our environment.

Signal detection theory also explains why a mother is awakened by a quiet murmur from her baby but not by other sounds that occur while she is asleep. This also applies to air traffic controller communication, pilot and driver control panels as discussed previously, and even the monitoring of patient vital information while a surgeon performs surgery. In the case of air traffic controllers, the controllers need to be able to detect planes among many signals (blips) that appear on the radar screen and follow those planes as they move through the sky. In fact, the original work of the researcher who developed signal detection theory was focused on improving the sensitivity of air traffic controllers to plane blips (Swets, 1964).

Our perceptions can also be affected by our beliefs, values, prejudices, expectations, and life experiences. As you will see later in this chapter, individuals who are deprived of the experience of binocular vision during critical periods of development have trouble perceiving depth (Fawcett, Wang, & Birch, 2005). The shared experiences of people within a given cultural context can have pronounced effects on perception. For example, Marshall Segall, Donald Campbell, and Melville Herskovits (1963) published the results of a multinational study in which they demonstrated that individuals from Western cultures were more prone to experience certain types of visual illusions than individuals from non-Western cultures, and vice versa. One such illusion that Westerners were more likely to experience was the Müller-Lyer illusion (figure below): The lines appear to be different lengths, but they are actually the same length.

In the Müller-Lyer illusion, lines appear to be different lengths although they are identical. (a) Arrows at the ends of lines may make the line on the right appear longer, although the lines are the same length. (b) When applied to a three-dimensional image, the line on the right again may appear longer although both black lines are the same length.

   These perceptual differences were consistent with differences in the types of environmental features experienced on a regular basis by people in a given cultural context. People in Western cultures, for example, have a perceptual context of buildings with straight lines, what Segall's study called a carpentered world (Segall et al., 1966). In contrast, people from certain non-Western cultures with an uncarpentered view, such as the Zulu of South Africa, whose villages are made up of round huts arranged in circles, are less susceptible to this illusion (Segall et al., 1999). It is not just vision that is affected by cultural factors. Indeed, research has demonstrated that the ability to identify an odor, and rate its pleasantness and its intensity, varies cross-culturally (Ayabe-Kanamura, Saito, Distel, Martínez-Gómez, & Hudson, 1998). In terms of color vision across cultures, research has found derived color terms for brown, orange and pink hues do appear to be influenced by cultural differences (Zollinger, 1988).

Children described as thrill seekers are more likely to show taste preferences for intense sour flavors (Liem, Westerbeek, Wolterink, Kok, & de Graaf, 2004), which suggests that basic aspects of personality might affect perception. Furthermore, individuals who hold positive attitudes toward reduced-fat foods are more likely to rate foods labeled as reduced fat as tasting better than people who have less positive attitudes about these products (Aaron, Mela, & Evans, 1994).

SUMMARY

   Sensation occurs when sensory receptors detect sensory stimuli. Perception involves the organization, interpretation, and conscious experience of those sensations. All sensory systems have both absolute and difference thresholds, which refer to the minimum amount of stimulus energy or the minimum amount of difference in stimulus energy required to be detected about 50% of the time, respectively. Sensory adaptation, selective attention, and signal detection theory can help explain what is perceived and what is not. In addition, our perceptions are affected by a number of factors, including beliefs, values, prejudices, culture, and life experiences.

References:

Openstax Psychology text by Kathryn Dumper, William Jenkins, Arlene Lacombe, Marilyn Lovett and Marion Perlmutter licensed under CC BY v4.0. https://openstax.org/details/books/psychology

Exercises

Review Questions:

1. ________ refers to the minimum amount of stimulus energy required to be detected 50% of the time.

a. absolute threshold

b. difference threshold

c. just noticeable difference

d. transduction

2. Decreased sensitivity to an unchanging stimulus is known as ________.

a. transduction

b. difference threshold

c. sensory adaptation

d. inattentional blindness

3. ________ involves the conversion of sensory stimulus energy into neural impulses.

a. sensory adaptation

b. inattentional blindness

c. difference threshold

d. transduction

4. ________ occurs when sensory information is organized, interpreted, and consciously experienced.

a. sensation

b. perception

c. transduction

d. sensory adaptation

Critical Thinking Question:

1. Not everything that is sensed is perceived. Do you think there could ever be a case where something could be perceived without being sensed?

2. Please generate a novel example of how just noticeable difference can change as a function of stimulus intensity.

Personal Application Question:

1. Think about a time when you failed to notice something around you because your attention was focused elsewhere. If someone pointed it out, were you surprised that you hadn't noticed it right away?

Glossary:

absolute threshold

bottom-up processing

inattentional blindness

just noticeable difference

perception

sensation

sensory adaptation

signal detection theory

subliminal message

top-down processing

transduction

Answers to Exercises

Review Questions:

1. A

2. C

3. D

4. B

Critical Thinking Question:

1. This would be a good time for students to think about claims of extrasensory perception. Another interesting topic would be the phantom limb phenomenon experienced by amputees.

2. There are many potential examples. One example involves the detection of weight differences. If two people are holding standard envelopes and one contains a quarter while the other is empty, the difference in weight between the two is easy to detect. However, if those envelopes are placed inside two textbooks of equal weight, the ability to discriminate which is heavier is much more difficult.

Glossary:

absolute threshold: minimum amount of stimulus energy that must be present for the stimulus to be detected 50% of the time

bottom-up processing: system in which perceptions are built from sensory input

inattentional blindness: failure to notice something that is completely visible because of a lack of attention

just noticeable difference: difference in stimuli required to detect a difference between the stimuli

perception:way that sensory information is interpreted and consciously experienced

sensation:what happens when sensory information is detected by a sensory receptor

sensory adaptation:not perceiving stimuli that remain relatively constant over prolonged periods of time

signal detection theory: change in stimulus detection as a function of current mental state

subliminal message:message presented below the threshold of conscious awareness

top-down processing:interpretation of sensations is influenced by available knowledge, experiences, and thoughts

transduction: conversion from sensory stimulus energy to action potential

durbincouncervany99.blogspot.com

Source: https://opentext.wsu.edu/psych105/chapter/5-2-sensation-versus-perception/

Share this post