PS101 Lecture Notes - Ames Room, Semicircular Canals, Depth Perception
Document Summary
Sensation and perception - ps101 lecture october 14th, 2011. Sensation: stimulation of sense organs (ex absorbing e from light by eyes) Sensation and perception are hard to separate, because people automatically start organizing incoming sensory stimulation the moment it arrives. Psychophysics = the study of how physical stimuli are translated into psychological experience, therefore, psychologists in this area are interested mostly in sensation and perception. Sensation begins with a detectable stimulus but what counts as detectable depends on whom or what is doing the detecting. Threshold: a dividing point between e levels that do and don"t have detectable effect (ex automatic lights turn on when a threshold is reached). Just noticeable difference (jnd): the smallest difference in the amount of stimulation that a specific sense can detect (smallest difference detectable) ex musicians, pain, ect. Being asked whether 1 light has 2x the e of another and is 2x as bright - ex. of scaling.
