PS102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Aspirin, Visual Acuity, Vestibular System
Document Summary
Sensation is the process through which the senses detect visual, auditory, and other sensory stimuli and transmit them to the brain: understand the world we live in through all the sensory info we gain. Perception is the process by which sensory information is actively organized and interpreted by the brain. Sensation and perception work together: ex: eye looking at plus sign and dot. Your brain fills in that unseeable area: blind spot where the optic nerve is. Info goes to the brain through that nerve, so at that spot you have no photoreceptors! The second you detect sensory information, it is there and available. Conversation of stimuli to neural impulses only ocurrs when stimuli reaches this level. Absolute threshold is the smallest amount of a stimulus that one can detect 50% of the time. There must be a fraction of a difference for us to notice the difference in a sense.