PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Power Law, Principles Of Grouping, Response Bias

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jill L Atkinson

Document Summary

The study of sensation and perception represents the origins of psychology. Sensations and perceptions are related, but are crucially different concepts. Sensation is the process by which our sensory systems gather information about the environment, while perception is the selection, organization, and interpretation of sensations as meaningful objects and event. Sensation refers to the processes that turn chemical, mechanical, sound and light energy in the world into electrical signals in the brain. Perception is more related to extracting meaning from what you sense and trying to do what you know and understand. Each of the senses has a complex transduction process, where electrical potentials in receptor cells are generated in response to physical stimuli. Each receptor varies its responses quantitatively (changes in magnitude of stimulus such as intensity in light in brightness) and qualitatively (changes in the type of stimulus of energy, such as colour of light).